Principles of organic life : showing that the gases are of equal importances with the solids and fluids in the laws which regulate the progress of matter from the lowest inorganic to the highest organic conditions / [Benjamin Ridge].
- Ridge, Benjamin
- Date:
- 1875
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Principles of organic life : showing that the gases are of equal importances with the solids and fluids in the laws which regulate the progress of matter from the lowest inorganic to the highest organic conditions / [Benjamin Ridge]. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![thereof, cannot by any possibility be derived from the arterial currents alone. If we had ten or twenty times the quantity of arterial blood we now have, it still could not do it. AVe must review our dogmas on physiology, and not assign to the arterial currents duties which it is totally impossible they can perform, from their very insufficiency to do so. VIII. What are, then, the great feeding tributaries of what may be called the inorganic lubricators, taking them as distinct actors in the animal economy? and. What have the gases of the body to do with its general economy ? As all animal as well as vegetable life is subject to an atmospheric pressure of 15 lbs. to every square inch, Avhat resisting agency has the body to oppose to this ? Dissimilar as these three questions may appear, yet they cannot be separated. It must be evident to all, that if there is so great an atmospheric pressure, there must be a greater internal force to resist it. What- ever proportion that is, cannot, perhaps, be correctly determined, and it may be open to anyone to say what it is. I shall content myself by putting it hypothe- tically at seventeen, for the sake of argument; so that 17 lbs. internal radiation resist 15 lbs. external pres- sure ; sometimes it may be more, sometimes less. Speaking first of the atmospheric ])ressure, the oxygen of the air may be termed the pabulum of the lungs. It gets into them by inspiration, and is used, no doubt, for the purposes assigned by physiologists. It is very evident that a large consumption of oxygen is neces- sary, simply for the lungs as well as the oxydation of the blood in them; but all this oxygen going to the](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b2807256x_0088.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
