The Spleen

The spleen:

• attracts what is proper to it
• rejects what is foreign
• has a natural power of altering and retaining all that it attracts.

This is the same with the liver, veins, arteries, heart, or any other organ.

These 4 faculties are necessary for every part which is to be nourished.

This is why we have called these faculties the handmaids of nutrition.

Human faeces are most pleasing to dogs.

Likewise, the residual matters from the liver are, some of them, proper to the spleen,353 others to the gall-bladder, and others to the kidneys.

Chapter 10

The statements which the Ancients made on these points were correct. But they yet did not defend their arguments with logical proofs.

Chapter 11

In people who are very hungry, the stomach attracts or draws down the food before it has been thoroughly softened in the mouth.

In those who have no appetite or who are being forced to eat, the stomach is displeased and rejects the food.354

In a similar way each of the other organs possesses both faculties—that of attracting what is proper to it, and that of rejecting what is foreign.

Thus, even if there be any organ which consists of only one coat (such as the two bladders,355 the uterus, and the veins), it yet possesses both kinds of fibres, the longitudinal and the transverse.

But further, there are fibres of a third kind—the oblique—which are much fewer in number than the two kinds already spoken of. In the organs consisting of two coats this kind of fibre is found in the one coat only, mixed with the longitudinal fibres;

But in the organs composed of one coat it is found along with the other two kinds. Now, these are of the greatest help to the action of the faculty which we have named retentive.

For during this period the part needs to be tightly contracted and stretched over its contents at every point—the stomach during the whole period of digestion,356 and the uterus during that of gestation.

Thus too, the coat of a vein, being single, consists of various kinds of fibres; whilst the outer coat of an artery consists of circular fibres, and its inner coat mostly of longitudinal fibres, but with a few oblique ones also amongst them. Veins thus resemble the uterus or the bladder as regards the arrangement of their fibres, even though they are deficient in thickness; similarly arteries resemble the stomach.

Alone of all organs the intestines consist of two coats of which both have their fibres transverse.357

Now the proof that it was for the best that all the organs should be naturally such as they are (that, for instance, the intestines should be composed of two coats) belongs to the subject of the use of parts358; thus we must not now desire to hear about matters of this kind nor why the anatomists are at variance regarding the number of coats in each organ. For these questions have been sufficiently discussed in the treatise “On Disagreement in Anatomy.” And the problem as to why each organ has such and such a character will be discussed in the treatise “On the Use of Parts.”