314 LIFE AND DEATH. 



economy exist : — the digestive apparatus which pre- 

 pares the food and enables it to pass into the blood, 

 into the lymph, and finally into the liquid medium 

 which bathes each cell and constitutes its real 

 medium ; the respiratory apparatus which imports 

 the oxygen and exports the gaseous excrement, 

 carbonic acid; the heart and the circulatory system 

 which distributes through the system the internal 

 medium, suitably purified and recuperated. The 

 organization is dominated by the necessities of 

 cellular life. This is the law of the city, to which 

 Claude Bernard has given the name of the latv of the 

 constitution of organisms. 



Death by Lesion of the Major Organs. Vital 

 Tripod. — Thus we understand what life is, and at the 

 same time what is the death of a complex living 

 being. The city perishes if its more or less compli- 

 cated mechanisms which look after its revictualling 

 and its discharge are seriously affected at any point. 

 The different groups may survive for a more or less 

 lengthy period, but progressively deprived of the 

 means of food or of discharge, they are finally 

 involved in the general ruin. If the heart stops, 

 there is a universal famine ; if the lungs are seriously 

 injured, we are asphyxiated ; if the principal organ 

 of discharge, the kidney, ceases to perform its allotted 

 task, there is a general poisoning by the used-up and 

 toxic materials retained in the blood. 



We understand how the integrity of the major 

 organs, — the heart, the lungs, the kidney, — is indis- 

 pensable to the maintenance of existence. We 

 understand that their lesion, by a series of successive 

 repercussions, involves universal death. We always 

 die, said the doctors of old, because of the failure of 



