The motions of the heart, the circulation of the blood, etc viewed morphologically.
- Macvicar, John Gibson, 1800-1884.
- Date:
- 1871
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: The motions of the heart, the circulation of the blood, etc viewed morphologically. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.
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![But to proceed. The sp]iere, .then, being the type or ideal of an individualized form in reference to a mechanical system, such as that of the material creation, and these being the principles in- volved in this theory as to the type of form in nature, we are, in such a hypothesis, not only in possession of a principle to guide our systematic arrangements in natural history, but we are able to propose and solve many problems having most interesting bearings on anatomy and physiology. Thus, we may propose the problem, to construct out of a suitable plastic fluid a vessel which shall act like a force-pump that works itself, and shall propel the remainder of the plastic fluid through the organism as long as possible. Nor can we merely propose this problem, which is plainly that of a heart. Our morphology enables us also to solve it. And to this let us now proceed. In practical mechanics the most analogous problem and its solution is perhaps the hydraulic ram—a most ingenious and beautiful apparatus for raising water by its own pressure to a higher level than its fountain,—which, however, unhappily, does not require a stethoscope to render audible the noise it makes, else it would doubtless be much more generally used than it is. First, then, since this organism which we propose to construct is to work itself, and since no work is possible without dissipation of energy from the machine at work, our organism, since it cannot stand altogether alone, must be put in the way of obtaining a supply of energy from some other source as fast as it parts with its own. Now, this is secured for every part of the organization of an animal by the arrangement that the air, which is the great terrestrial storehouse of the energy of nature, is dovetailed into the animal, and made to give up its energy to the animal by continually renewed supplies of combustible matter (food), which are thrown in upon the air when within the animal, as coals are into the steam-engine developing within the organism—not indeed a tissue of elastic vapour, first to fill the boiler, and then to be duly ramified through the engine, but—a tissue slightly concrete (in which also hydrogen plays an important part), first to fill the skull, and then to'^be duly ramified through the entire organization. In a word in virtue of the connexion of the organism with the air and food that organism is made to be (specially in the nervous system) a store of energy—such a store as tends, as often as it is emptied by work, to be replenished anew by the ambient energy of the universe. The first condition, then, is satisfied. The second is, that the proposed vessel or chamber which is to act as a force-pump upon the remainder of the plastic fluid out of which It has been itself constructed shall (1) possess a non-spheri- \ foN' 1 instance, a pyramidal or conical or hemiform shape : and (2) be so organized as to its muscular fibres and their fulcra etc. that it sliall be with respect to the plastic fluid contained in it as it It were itself plastic. These conditions fulfilled, it will, under tlie law of symmetry, which ever acts in the interest of sphericity](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21452027_0007.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
