Ourselves, our food, and our physic / [Benjamin Ridge].

  • Ridge, Benjamin
Date:
1884
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Ourselves, our food, and our physic / [Benjamin Ridge]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    losses, death ensues, because the first link of the chain is broken. This does not apply to those cases where large arteries are directly severed, when blood and oxygen rapidly escaping, quickly causes death. Protoplasm being, there¬ fore, the true first formative power, it keeps all parts for ever afterwards in as perfect a state as possible, and can alone repair them if injured ; hence we may infer, that not the minutest part of the body is without its own elementary matter for its own integrity, whilst every part depends upon the oxygen carried to it by the arteries for its vitality. It is irrational to suppose that great centres have control over everything ; every part of the body is governed by its own laws, and is the seat of a vital principle, yet there are enormous sympathies one part with another, however near or however distant. The inorganic protoplasmic fluids have not been suffi¬ ciently acknowledged as a separate existent circulation, whilst their independent presence explain many phenomena of life. Nature is always most careful in securing a large amount of these as an actual working capital to start with. Tor example, when young fish escape from their envelope ; their umbilical bags are quickly absorbed within them. So again with the chick, just emerging from its shell, with a bag of unused protoplasm. Suddenly this is absorbed into its abdomen, which immediately closes upon it. At first it can scarcely stand upright, with its heavily-laden pot-belly : this is its first stock-in-trade, which it gradually assimilates within its tissues. With the infant these ex¬ cesses are thrown off into an envelope or amniotic bag in which it is enclosed; nature having first provided it with a sufficiency of them in her natural sponges, the mucous and serous membranes, and with a quantity which per¬ meates through all interstitial spaces. Thus, the proto¬ plasmic fluids abound everywhere, and form three-fourths of our entire weight. Amongst the most valuable of the protoplasmic elements are the phosphates, and where they most gravitate they furnish the elementary matter of bones and nerves. Any excess, or that which does not solidify, remains pulpy, and is conve}red, along with albumen and gelatine and other fluids, into the spinal column during its formation, and