ancreas is very complex. It carries on the work of
the saliva, and also splits insoluble fats into a soluble milky emulsion.

Fats are unaffected in the mouth and stomach, which explains why hot,
buttered toast, and other hot, greasy dishes are so indigestible. The
butter on plain bread is quickly cleared off, and the bread attacked by the
gastric juice, but in toast or fatty dishes, the fat is intimately mixed
with other ingredients, none of which can properly be dealt with. Always
butter toast when cold.

To continue: The secretion of the pancreas also contains a very active
ferment, which, on entering the bowel, meets and mixes with another ferment
four times as powerful as gastric juice, which completes the digestion of
the proteids.

Meantime, the secretions of Lieberkuehn's glands (of which there are immense
numbers in the small intestine) are further aiding the digestion of the
chyme, while the liver (the largest and most important gland in the body)
sends its ferments, and the gall-bladder its bile, which further emulsifies
the fatty acids and glycerin until they are ready to be absorbed.

The chemically-changed chyme is now termed Chyle, and is ready to be
absorbed by the minute, projecting Villi.

The fatty portion of the chyle is absorbed by minute capillaries and
ultimately mingles with the blood, which may look quite milky after a fatty
meal.

The remaining food is absorbed by the blood capillaries in the villi, and
passes to the liver for filtration and storage.

The large bowel has Lieberkuehn's glands, but not villi, and is relatively
unimportant, though most of the water the body needs is absorbed from here.

How food becomes energy and tissue we do not know. The tissues are
continually being built up from assimilated food, and as constantly being
burnt away, oxygen for this purpose being extracted from the air we inhale,
and carried via the blood to every corner of the body. The ashes of this
burning are expelled into the blood and lymph, and carried out of the body
by the kidneys, lungs, skin and bowels. The product of the burning is the
marvel--Life; the extinction of the fire is the terror--Death.

Energy is obtained almost solely from the combustion of fats and sugars,
proteids being reconverted into albumin, and then broken down to obtain
their carbon for combustion, the nitrogen being expelled, but proteids are
essential for the building of the tissues themselves, the stones of the
furna