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, be 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