EVIDENCE PROVING THE STATEMENT OF THE CASE 85 



absorbing, either with his food or by means of the 

 lungs and, perhaps in a small part, by the skin surface. 



Certain of these rarer atoms, existing not only in 

 air, but probably in all other material, having thus 

 obtained access into the circulating system, are arrested 

 in a suitable soil, called the ovary of the female. This 

 is no exception to the order of things. Every part of 

 the body has its selective property. The selection 

 always takes place from the blood. The knowledge of 

 this fundamental fact is the basis of the principles of 

 medicine. Its study in the division of labour is the 

 province of the physician and the doctor. 



"Many medicines," says Dr. Louis Buchner, "after 

 being received in the animal body, show a decided 

 predilection for the individual organs, tissues, or 

 systems of that body, especially for the nervous system 

 and its subdivisions. Some act upon the peripheral 

 nerves, others upon the spinal cord, others upon the 

 brain. It is therefore manifest, that these medicines, 

 carried with the blood through the whole system, are 

 only attracted in certain spots." l The study of these 

 spots and the medicine which will react on them in a 

 beneficial way, is the science of medicine. Not only 

 with medicine is this a fundamental fact, but our food 

 is digested and enters into the circulation, and each 

 part of the body selects from the very complex 

 compound, the blood, that which is necessary to repair 

 the waste continually going on during life. 2 



1 " Force and Matter," Dr. Louis Buchner, 1864, p. 181. 



2 \\r e recognize, then, that the absorption of digested matter 

 depends upon two conditions : firstly, a physical condition the 

 diffusibility of the digested material ; secondly, a physiological con- 

 dition the selective activity of the epithelium through which 



