The liver (LLLL, p. 171) is a very large glandular body lying under the short ribs of the right side, immediately below the diaphragm or midriff, to which it is attached by strong ligamentary bands, which sustain its weight and keep it in its place. Its office is to secrete the bile, but it differs in one important particular from every other secreting organ. Its secretion is derived, not, as in other instances, from the arterial or nutritive blood, but from the _venous_ or exhausted blood, which is collected from all the abdominal organs, and transmitted through it for this purpose on its way back to the heart. From this peculiarity, it is legitimately enough inferred that the liver serves the double purpose of providing a fluid indispensable for chylification and the proper action of the bowels as organs of excretion, and also of separating from the venous blood useless or spent materials, which require to be thrown out of the system. The influence of the bile as a stimulant to the bowels is proved by the fact that costiveness ensues when it is deficient in quantity, and an opposite condition when the secretion is redundant, as during the heat of autumn. _Bile_ is a bitter, viscid, greenish-yellow fluid, the taste and general appearance of which are familiar to most people, and the office of which in the animal economy must be one of no small moment, if it be justly chargeable with even a tenth part of the catalogue of human ills which are laid to its account. Its secretion seems to go on continuously; but the quantity produced depends much on the amount of venous blood which is circulating through the liver at the time. Hence, in health, it is always greatest soon after a meal; because, as we have already seen, the supply of blood in both the arteries and the veins connected with digestion is then at its maximum. But as the secretion of the bile is constantly going on, and its presence in the duodenum is required only when the latter contains chyme, a contrivance becomes requisite for storing it up in the interval, to be ready for use when wanted. This is effected by the small shut sac or bag G, named the _gall_ (or bile) _bladder_, which adheres to the lower surface of the liver, and is always most full after a fast of some duration. The bile contained in the gall-bladder is generally more viscid, dark, and bitter, than that which proceeds directly from the liver--apparently from the absorption of its more fluid parts. It is in this bag that _gall-stones_, as they are called, are sometimes formed, and it is their passage through the narrow tube in which it terminates that causes the acute pain so often complained of in that affliction.