In fact, it is the most powerful digestive gland in the body.

Its juice, the pancreatic juice, can do everything that any other digestive juice can, and do it better.

It contains a ferment for turning starch into sugar, which is far more powerful than that of the saliva; also another (_trypsin_), which will dissolve meat-stuffs nearly twice as fast as the pepsin of the stomach can; and still another, not possessed by either mouth or stomach glands, which will melt fat, so that it can be sucked up by the lining cells of the intestine.
What does this great combination of powers in the pancreas mean?
It means that we have now reached the real centre and chief seat of digestion, namely, the small intestine, or upper bowel.

This is where the food is really absorbed, taken up into the blood, and distributed to the body.

All changes before this have been merely preparatory; all after it are simply a picking up of the pieces that remain.
In general appearance, this division of the food tube is very simple--merely a tube about twenty feet long and an inch in diameter, thrown into coils, so as to pack into small space, and slung up to the backbone by broad loops of a delicate tissue (_mesentery_).