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The sweetbread, a gland connected with the intestine of nearly all vertebrates. It is usually elongated and light-colored, and its secretion, called the pancreatic juice, is discharged, often together with the bile, into the upper part of the intestines, and is a powerful aid in digestion. See Illust. of Digestive appa…

A digestive gland in Crustacea, Mollusca, etc., usually called the liver, but different from the liver of vertebrates.

One of the granular masses which constitute a racemose or compound gland, as the pancreas; also, one of the saccular recesses in the lobules of a racemose gland. Quain.

rystalline substance (C5H5N5O) contained in guano. It is also a constituent of the liver, pancreas, and other glands in mammals.

efaction. It is also found as a constituent of various tissues and organs, as the spleen, pancreas, etc., and likewise in the vegetable kingdom. Chemically it is to be considered as amido-caproic acid. (CH3)2CH.CH2.CH(NH2)-COOH. L-leucine, the natural form, is present in most proteins.

Of or pertaining to the pancreas; as, the pancreatic secretion, digestion, ferments. Pancreatic juice (Physiol.), a colorless alkaline fluid secreted intermittently by the pancreatic gland. It is one of the most important of the digestive fluids, containing at least three distinct ferments, trypsin, steapsin and an amy…

nts of the pancreatic juice; also, a preparation containing such a ferment, made from the pancreas of animals, and used in medicine as an aid to digestion.

atter into soluble and diffusible products, as peptones. " The proteolytic ferment of the pancreas." Foster.

Either the thymus gland or the pancreas, the former being called neck, or throat, sweetbread, the latter belly sweetbread. The sweetbreads of ruminants, esp. of the calf, are highly esteemed as food. See Pancreas, and Thymus.

The antecedent of trypsin, a substance which is contained in the cells of the pancreas and gives rise to the trypsin.

A white crystalline nitrogenous substance present in small amount in the pancreas and spleen, and formed in large quantity from the decomposition of proteid matter by various means, -- as by pancreatic digestion, by putrefaction as of cheese, by the action of boiling acids, etc. Chemically, it consists of oxyphenol and…

ystalline nitrogenous compound, C5H4O2N4, present in muscle tissue, in the liver, spleen, pancreas, and other organs, and also in urine (in small quantities) and some urinary calculi, and in the juices of certain plants; -- so called because it leaves a yellow residue when evaporated to dryness with nitric acid. Xanthi…

not being themselves actual ferments, may by internal changes give rise to a ferment. The pancreas contains but little ready-made ferment, though there is present in it a body, zymogen, which gives birth to the ferment. Foster.