The Gastric Artery, Or Coronaria Ventriculi, is smaller than the hepatic or splenic; it proceeds at first upwards, forwards, and to the left side, to reach the cardiac orifice of the stomach: in this situation it often sends a large branch to the left lobe of the liver; but its constant branches are—first, an cesophageal branch or branches, which ascend, one in front of, the other, the more remarkable, behind the oesophagus: they supply this tube and anastomose with the oesophageal branches of the thoracic aorta; secondly, some coronary branches, which surround the cardiac orifice; and, thirdly, a long descending branch, which follows the lesser curvature of the stomach, lying in a kind of triangular canal situated between the layers of the lesser omentum and the stomach : the artery is in this situation accompanied by some lymphatic vessels and glands, and by several branches of the left pneumogastric nerve: it sends numerous divisions over both surfaces of the stomach, and thus communicates with the arteries running along its convex margin. Having arrived near the pylorus, it terminates in anastomosing with the superior pyloric, which is a branch of the hepatic artery.

We shall find that not the gastric artery only, but the three divisions of the cceliac axis supply the stomach, so that its margin is in fact circumscribed by vessels. The gastric branches of these vessels are situated between the layers of the peritoneum, and are not in contact with the margins of the stomach, unless in its distended state: this observation does not apply to the minute divisions which ramify on both surfaces of this viscus.