574 SALT AND ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL USES. 



ph3\siological solution. Some niituralists, recalling the circumstances 

 under which life appeared on the globe, and the manner in which it 

 was for a long time maintained in the saline waters of the Paleozoic 

 seas, have thought they perceived in this fact the survival of an 

 ancestral condition. 



From this point of view chloride of sodium would be an element 

 handed down from remote times, belonging to a medium suitable to 

 animal life, to the blood and to the organic humors; and salted food, 

 b^' introducing it about the anatomical elements of the body, would 

 recall the marine origin of animal life, would ccjnnect, as one may say, 

 the physiology of the present with that of the past. * * * 



