All kind of nourishing victuals is understood to be comprehended in these
two, and from hence in the Gothish tongue is called companage. To find out
this meat and drink, to prepare and boil it, the hands are put to work, the
feet do walk and bear up the whole bulk of the corporal mass; the eyes
guide and conduct all; the appetite in the orifice of the stomach, by means
of (a) little sourish black humour, called melancholy, which is transmitted
thereto from the milt, giveth warning to shut in the food. The tongue doth
make the first essay, and tastes it; the teeth do chew it, and the stomach
doth receive, digest, and chylify it. The mesaraic veins suck out of it
what is good and fit, leaving behind the excrements, which are, through
special conduits for that purpose, voided by an expulsive faculty.
Thereafter it is carried to the liver, where it being changed again, it by
the virtue of that new transmutation becomes blood. What joy, conjecture
you, will then be found amongst those officers when they see this rivulet
of gold, which is their sole restorative? No greater is the joy of
alchemists, when after long travail, toil, and expense they see in their
furnaces the transmutation. Then is it that every member doth prepare
itself, and strive anew to purify and to refine this treasure. The kidneys
through the emulgent veins draw that aquosity from thence which you call
urine, and there send it away through the ureters to be slipped downwards;
where, in a lower receptacle, and proper for it, to wit, the bladder, it is
kept, and stayeth there until an opportunity to void it out in his due
time. The spleen draweth from the blood its terrestrial part, viz., the
grounds, lees, or thick substance settled in the bottom thereof, which you
term melancholy. The bottle of the gall subtracts from thence all the
superfluous choler; whence it is brought to another shop or work-house to
be yet better purified and fined, that is, the heart, which by its
agitation of diastolic and systolic motions so neatly subtilizeth and
inflames it, that in the right side ventricle it is brought to perfection,
and through the veins is sent to all the members. Each parcel of the body