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THE 



POPULAR SCIENCE 

 MONTHLY 



MAY, 1908 



SOME NEW VIEW POINTS IN NUTRITION 1 



By Professor RUSSELL H. CHITTENDEN 



SHEFFIELD SCIENTIFIC SCHOOL OF YALE UNIVERSITY 



IN the latter part of the seventeenth century, long prior to the 

 discovery of oxygen, the English chemist, John Mayow, had laid 

 hold of the important principle that there is something in the air 

 necessary for combustion ; that this something is capable of exerting its 

 influence whether it exists free in the air or is combined in the sub- 

 stance undergoing combustion. Further, he pointed out that in the 

 processes of burning and breathing there is a certain definite relation- 

 ship in that both consist in the consumption of the so-called igneo- 

 aerial particles of the air. He made clear by experiment that the 

 views then prevailing regarding respiration, in which it was held that 

 breathing serves to cool the heat of the heart or to facilitate the 

 passage of the blood from the right to the left side of the heart were 

 quite erroneous. He maintained that in breathing, something belong- 

 ing to the air, something essential for sustaining life passes from 

 the air into the blood. To quote from his own statement : 2 " On the 

 one hand it clearly appears that animals exhaust the air of certain 

 vital particles which are of an elastic nature. On the other hand there 

 can not be the slightest doubt but that some constituent of the air 

 absolutely necessary to life enters into the blood in the act of breath- 

 ing." 



We fully understand to-day that Mayow's igneo-aerial particles were 

 what we call oxygen, and that in some mysterious fashion he had 



1 An address before the Sigma Xi societies of the universities of Missouri, 

 Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa and Minnesota, February, 1908. 



2 Taken from Sir Michael Foster's " Lectures on the History of Physiology 

 during the Sixteenth, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries," Cambridge Uni- 

 versity Press, 1901, p. 194. 



VOL. lxxii. — 25. 



