Ingested food, passing down the alimentary tract, was absorbed as chyle from the intestine, collected by the portal vessel, and conveyed by it to the liver. That organ, the site of the innate heat in Galen's view, had the power of elaborating the chyle into venous blood and of imbuing it with a spirit or pneuma which is innate in all living substance, so long as it remains alive, the _natural spirits_ (πνευμα φυσικον {pneuma physikon}, _spiritus naturalis_ of the mediaevals). Charged with this, and also with the nutritive material derived from the food, the venous blood is distributed by the liver through the veins which arise from it in the same way as the arteries from the heart. These veins carry nourishment and _natural spirits_ to all parts of the body. _Iecur fons venarum_, the liver as the source of the veins, remained through the centuries the watchword of the Galenic physiology. The blood was held to ebb and flow continuously in the veins during life. Now from the liver arose one great vessel, the hepatic vein, from division of which the others were held to come off as branches. Of these branches, one, our _common vena cava_, entered the right side of the heart. For the blood that it conveyed to the heart there were two fates possible. The greater part remained awhile in the ventricle, parting with its impurities and vapours, exhalations of the organs, which were carried off by the _artery-like vein_ (φλεπς αρτηριωδης {phleps artêriôdês}, the mediaeval _vena arterialis_, our pulmonary artery) to the lung and then exhaled to the outer air. These impurities and vapours gave its poisonous and suffocating character to the breath. Having parted thus with its impurities, the venous blood ebbed back again from the right ventricle into the venous system. But for a small fraction of the venous blood that entered the right ventricle another fate was reserved. This small fraction of venous blood, charged still with the _natural spirits_ derived from the liver, passed through minute channels in the septum between the ventricles and entered the left chamber. Arrived there, it encountered the external pneuma and became thereby elaborated into a higher form of spirit, the _vital spirits_ (πνευμα ζωτικον {pneuma zôtikon}, _spiritus vitalis_), which is distributed together with blood by the arterial system to various parts of the body. In the arterial system it also ebbed and flowed, and might be seen and felt to pulsate there.