From the pylorus, or right orifice of the stomach, arise the intestines, or bowels, which consist of a long and large tube, making several circumvolutions, in the cavity of the abdomen; this tube is about five or six times as long as the body to which it belongs. Though it is one continued pipe, it has been divided, by anatomists, into six parts, three small, three large. The three small intestines are the duodenum, the jejunum, and the ileum; the duodenum commences at the pylorus, and is continued into the jejunum, which is so called from its being generally found empty: the ileum is only a prolongation of the jejunum, and terminates in the first of the great intestines, called the caecum. The other great guts are the colon and the rectum. The whole of what has been described is only a production of the same tube, beginning at the oesophagus. It is called by anatomists the intestinal canal, or prima via, because it is the first passage of the food. It has circular muscular fibres, which give it a power of contracting when irritated by distension; and this urges forward the food which is contained in it. This occasions a worm like motion of the whole intestines, which is called their peristaltic motion. The mesentery is a membrane beginning loosely on the loins, and thence extending to all the intestines; which it preserves from twisting by their peristaltic motion. It serves also to sustain all the vessels going to and from the intestines, namely the arteries, veins, lacteals, and nerves; it also contains several glands, called, from their situation, mesenteric glands. The lacteal vessels consist of a vast number of fine pellucid tubes, which arise by open mouths from the intestines, and proceeding thence through the mesentery, they frequently unite, and form fewer and larger vessels, which pass through the mesenteric glands, into a common receptacle or bag, called the receptacle of the chyle. The use of these vessels is to absorb the fluid part of the digested aliment, called chyle, and convey it into the receptacle of the chyle, that it may be thence carried through the thoracic duct into the blood. The receptacle of the chyle is a membranous bag, about two thirds of an inch long, and one third of an inch wide, at its superior part it is contracted into a slender membranous pipe, called the thoracic duct, because its course is principally through the thorax; it passes between the aorta and the vena azygos, then obliquely over the oesophagus, and great curvature of the aorta, and continuing its course towards the internal jugular vein, it enters the left subclavian vein on its superior part.