DISINTEGRATION OF THE SOLIDS. 487 



great in proportion to their activity at the time, a continual 

 disintegration of the living solids, which, in so far as it is a 

 chemical operation, takes place under the animal temperature 

 in the presence of the oxygen freely supplied in respiration, 

 and conveyed from the lungs by the arterial blood to the 

 capillary vessels of every part of the living system.* This dis- 



* What is here stated, as well as the subsequent observations 

 relative thereto, is left as written in the earlier part of the year, 

 before a kind of crusade arose in the course of the summer, 

 directed, as it would seem, against some of the views on the 

 disintegration of the solids for a long time received almost as 

 axioms in Physiology. This crusade took its rise from memoirs 

 in the scientific journals, by Frankland, by Tick and Wislicenus, 

 and by Lawes and Gilbert. It is, however, chiefly in some semi- 

 scientific publications that it has been carried to an unwarrantable 

 extent. To do Tick and Wislicenus justice, they could not cast 

 any doubt on the proposition contained in the sentence to which 

 this note is appended, since their memoir opens with the statement 

 that "it is now a universally acknowledged fact that muscular 

 action is brought about by chemical changes alone ; " and again, 

 "that all are not agreed what the substance is which by oxidation 

 furnishes the store of actual energy which is capable of being in 

 part transmuted into mechanical work." Neither can Frankland 

 nor Lawes and Gilbert be charged with denying the general pro- 

 position that the disintegration of component parts of the living 

 body is the source of its energy in mechanical effects ; yet in the 

 papers of Lawes and Gilbert, as well as in that of Frankland, undue 

 countenance is given to the idea that the chief materials for the 

 production of muscular power are non -nitrogenous, and that the 

 necessity for nutrition in the muscles is not greater after severe 

 exertions than after periods of quiescence. To maintain, as Frank- 

 land does, that the blood supplies the material by the transmutation 

 of which mechanical effects in the body, whether internal or ex- 

 ternal, are brought about, is hardly to deny that the disintegration 

 of living parts is their source for the blood does not contain 

 crude aliment, but aliment already elaborated in the processes 



