On the right side of the heart we have, then, two great valves, the
tricuspid valve between the auricle and the ventricle, and the semilunar
valve between the ventricle and the pulmonary artery. These let the
blood flow easily one way, but not the other. If you doubt this, try it.
Put a tube into either the superior or inferior vena cava of a fresh
heart, tying the other vena cava and another tube into the pulmonary
artery. If with a funnel you pour water into the tube in the vein, it
will run through auricle and ventricle and out through the tube of the
pulmonary artery as easily as possible; but if you try to pour water the
other way down the pulmonary artery, you will find you cannot do it; the
tube gets blocked directly, and only a few drops come back through the
heart into the vein.
Now slit up the pulmonary artery as far as you can, and note when you
cut it how stout and firm are its walls. You will find that it soon
divides into two branches, one for the right lung, one for the left.
Each of these, when it gets to the lung, divides into branches, and
these again into others, as far as you can follow them. You know from
what you have learnt already that these branches end in capillaries all
over the lungs.
=32.= Not far from the two main branches of the pulmonary artery you will
find, covered up perhaps with fat and other matters, some tubes which
you will at once recognize as veins, and if you open any one of these
you will find that you can put a thin rod into it, and that it leads in
one direction to the lungs, and in the other into the left side of the
heart. These are the _pulmonary veins_, and if you slit them right up
you will find they open (by four openings) into a cavity on the left
side of the heart, almost exactly like that cavity on the right side
which we called the right auricle (Fig. 11). This cavity is, in fact,
the =left auricle=; out of it there is an opening into the left ventricle,
very like the opening from the right auricle into the right ventricle.
It too is guarded by flap valves, exactly like the tricuspid valve, only
there are but two flaps instead of three (Fig. 9, _m.v._ 1, _m.v._ 2).
Hence this valve is called the =bicuspid=, or more frequently the =mitral=
valve. Its flaps have little threads by which they are fastened to the
walls of the ventricle, and in fact, except for there being two flaps
instead of three, the mitral valve is exactly like the tricuspid valve,
and acts exactly the same way.
If you cut with a pair of scissors from the auricle into the ventricle,
you will find the left ventricle (Fig. 11) very much like the right
ventricle, only its walls are very much thicker, so much thicker that
the left ventricle takes up the greater part of the heart. You will see
this if you now look at the outside of a fresh heart.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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