opposed Spallanzani, but
who finally became an ardent champion of the chemical theory. Hunter now
carried Spallanzani's experiments further and proved the action of the
digestive fluids after death. For many years anatomists had been puzzled
by pathological lesion of the stomach, found post mortem, when no
symptoms of any disorder of the stomach had been evinced during life.
Hunter rightly conceived that these lesions were caused by the action
of the gastric juice, which, while unable to act upon the living tissue,
continued its action chemically after death, thus digesting the walls
of the stomach in which it had been formed. And, as usual with his
observations, he turned this discovery to practical use in accounting
for certain phenomena of digestion. The following account of the stomach
being digested after death was written by Hunter at the desire of
Sir John Pringle, when he was president of the Royal Society, and the
circumstance which led to this is as follows: "I was opening, in his
presence, the body of a patient of his own, where the stomach was in
part dissolved, which appeared to him very unaccountable, as there had
been no previous symptom that could have led him to suspect any
disease in the stomach. I took that opportunity of giving him my ideas
respecting it, and told him that I had long been making experiments
on digestion, and considered this as one of the facts which proved a
converting power in the gastric juice.... There are a great many powers
in nature which the living principle does not enable the animal matter,
with which it is combined, to resist--viz., the mechanical and most
of the strongest chemical solvents. It renders it, however, capable of
resisting the powers of fermentation, digestion, and perhaps several
others, which are well known to act on the same matter when deprived of
the living principle and entirely to decompose it."

Hunter concludes his paper with the following paragraph: "These
appearances throw considerable light on the principle of digestion,
and show that it is neither a mechanical power, nor contractions of the
stomach, nor heat, but something secreted in the coats of the stomach,
and thrown into its cavity, which there animalizes the food or
assimilates it to the nature of the blood. The power of this juice is
confined or limited to certain substances, especially of the vegetable
and animal kingdoms; and although this menstruum is capable of acting
independently of t