Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Physiological chemistry (Volume 2). Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)
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![fibrin, is very often scarcely half composed of tins substance, in reality consisting, in addition to these molecules, of a very large quantity of fat which has been inadvertently suffered to remain, as is frequently the case in analyses of the blood. The precautionary rules which we have already laid down for the determination of albumen, apply to the investigation of chyle, more, perhaps, than to that of any other animal fluid. All the di- rections indicated for the determination of the fat in the blood, refer with equal force to the chyle. The ordinary rules hold good for the determination of the individual extracts and the various mineral consti- tuents. The older analyses, however, to which we might look for assist- ance, are scarcely able to yield us any purely physiological results, in consequence of their having been prosecuted without the benefit of those aids to analysis which we possess in the present day. The following observations give the results of the quantitative investigations of other observers, in addition to my own. The quantity of ivater in the chyle of horses fluctuates, according to the investigations of different inquirers, between 91 and 96g ; this chyle contains, therefore, as a minimum 4, and as a maximum 9g of solid con- stituents. Nasse found 90-57g of water in the chyle of a cat. The number of cells, cell-nuclei, and other molecules contained in the chyle must vary with the nature of the food that has been taken, but these relations, as we have already observed, do not at present admit of being determined. Except during the period of digestion, the chyle contains few cells and in almost all respects resembles the lymph. The quantity of fibrin in human chyle has not been determined; but attempts have frequently been made to ascertain the amount of this sub- stance in different animals, and especially in horses, although this has seldom been accomplished without an admixture of corpuscles and fat. In the chyle of the horse Tiedernann and Gmelin1 found from 049 to 0-7$, and Simon,2 from 0*09 to 0-44g ; I found a coagulum which was very rich in cells amount to 0495g, while the fibrin, as free from cells as possible, determined from the same chyle, amounted to 0-301g. Tiedernann and Gmelin found from 047 to 0-27° in the dog, and from 0-24 to 0-82g in the sheep; Rees found 0-37-3 in tne ass> an(* Nasse, 043g in the cat. Tiedernann and Gmelin found from 1-93 to 4*34g of albumen in the chyle of horses, and I found 3-464g as the mean of several analyses in the chyle of horses fed upon bran, and 3*064g in that of horses fed on starch. Tiedernann and Gmelin found l-64g of fat in the chyle of horses, Simon from 1-001 to 3480g, while I found from 0-563 to l-891g; Rees found 3-601-g in the chyle of the ass, and Nasse 3-27g in that of the cat. Simon found from 8-874 to 9-892-g of extractive matters free from salts in the solid residue of the chyle of horses, while I found 7-273g in that of horses, when fed upon bran, and 8-345$ when fed upon starch. The chyle of horses contained, according to Simon, from 6-7 to 7*3g of soluble salts (determined from the ash), while according to my own researches, it yielded 7*45g when the animals were fed upon bran, and 1 Verdauung nach Versuchen. Bd. 2, S. 75. 2 Med. Chem. Bd. 2, S. 241-244 [or English translation, vol. i. pp. 351-359],](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21136300_0019.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
