It is at times sacculated, but its chief interest is that, as Lebedinsky 1 has shown, the tip of the caecum in embryonic life opens to the exterior as the blastopore.
All rodents, with the sole exception of the dormice, have a caecum, often of great length and sacculated,, as in hares, the water-rat and porcupines; and the long colon in some, as the hamster and water-rat, is spirally twisted upon itself near the commencement.
The intestinal canal is long, and has, in addition to the ordinary short, but capacious and sacculated caecum at the commencement of the colon, lower down, a pair of large, conical, pointed caeca.
The descending colon is much narrower than the rest, and not sacculated, and, being considerably longer than the distance it has to traverse, is thrown into numerous folds.
In mammals both caecum and colon are often sacculated, a disposition caused by the arrangement of the longitudinal bands of muscular tissue in their walls; but the small intestine is always smooth and simple-walled externally, though its lining membrane often exhibits contrivances for increasing the absorbing surface without adding to the general bulk of the organ, such as the numerous small tags, or " villi," by which it is everywhere beset, and the more obvious transverse, longitudinal, or reticulating folds projecting into the interior, met with in many animals, of which the " valvulae conniventes " of man form well-known examples.