Volume 1

A treatise on diet and regimen / by William Henry Robertson.

Date:
1847-1848
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A treatise on diet and regimen / by William Henry Robertson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    crushed and broken, as in mastication,—to the same extent are they more readily and completely acted upon by the salivary ferment. Hence some of the importance and usefulness of the processes of cookery, so long known to he especially important in the case of the vegetable articles of food; and hence the beautiful aud remarkable provision, that the graminivorous and herbivorous animals have com- plicated means of mastication, and not merely incisor and canine, but grinding teeth, while their salivary glands are so much larger than are those of the carnivorous animals. Perhaps it remains to be shown and explained, how the amylaceous articles of food, that are swallowed without salivary admixture, come to be assimilated. This may, however, be explained, by the fact of saliva being subsequently swallowed for their conversion and solution; or it may not improbably lead to the finding, at length, an important use for the pancreas, which unquestion- ably secretes a fluid very similar in appearance, and, as it seems from the analyses, very similar in chemical character, to that of the salivary glands. It is in some degree confirmatory of this sugges- tion, that, in birds, M. Magendie should have found the pancreatic fluid so largely albuminous, as to coagulate on the application of heat, and therefore so capable of acting as a ferment,—that in the experi- mental researches of MM. Tiedemann and Gmelin, 1000 parts of the pancreatic fluid of a dog left 87 parts of solid residue, of alkaline character, the fluid itself having been so decidedly of albuminous