These observations, repeated a great number of times, evidently prove, that such is the manner in which the bile flows during abstinence and during digestion. (1) It appears that the liver is continually separating from itself a sensible quantity of bile, which increases during digestion. (2) That which is secreted during abstinence is divided between the intestine, which is always found coloured with it, and the gall bladder, which retains it without transmitting any portion of it through the cystic duct, and where, thus retained, it acquires a deeper colour and a character of acrimony, necessary, without doubt, to the digestion which is soon to follow. (3) When the food, having been digested by the stomach, passes into the duodenum, then all the hepatic bile, which was before divided, flows into the intestine, and even in greater abundance; the gall bladder also pours that which it contains upon the alimentary pulp, and with which it is then found quite incorporated. (4) After the intestinal digestion the hepatic bile diminishes, and begins to flow, part into the duodenum and part into the gall bladder, where, being then examined, it is clear and in small quantity, because it has not yet had time either to become coloured, or to collect. There is, therefore, this difference between the two kinds of bile, that the hepatic flows in a continual manner into the intestine, and the cystic, during the absence of digestion, flows back into the gall bladder; and whilst that function is going on it passes towards the duodenum; or rather it is always the same fluid, of which one part preserves the character it has when it leaves the liver, and the other part undergoes a change in the gall bladder. The difference of colour in the cystic bile, according to the time that it has remained in the gall bladder, is analogous to the colour of the urine, which becomes deeper as it is retained longer in its receptacle. [B] The bile in the gall bladder, the urine in the bladder, and the semen in the vesicula seminales, are certainly absorbed; but it is not the fluid itself that re-enters the circulation, but only its finest parts, some of its principles that we are not well acquainted with, probably its aqueous or lymphatic portion. This does not resemble the absorption in the pleura and other analogous membranes, in which the fluid rejoins the blood in the same state as it left it.