ORGANIC ELEMENTS 23 



fibres of absolutely solid walls of hardened tissue, as con- 

 taining envelopes of secreted fluids, must be understood 

 as expressing only halfway, tentative, or temporary truths, 

 applicable merely as convenient expressions in a transition 

 state of scientific belief, but lacking in present adaptability, 

 and requiring modification to meet the use of altered and 

 altering views and beliefs. 



The maintenance of this circulation, it will at once be 

 seen, is necessary for the accomplishment of the meta- 

 bolism of every texture, and for the existence of the 

 condition of physiological health of the organism of which 

 they form a part. Should it, therefore, fail in any part in 

 developed vasculature, or in atomic space, from any cause, 

 material or dynamic, then the first step in pathogenesis 

 will be taken, and, if followed up by continued steps in the 

 same direction, a fully developed pathological condition, 

 or disease, will be the inevitable result, recovery from 

 which may occur by renewal or reversal, or death from 

 progression or persistence of the circulatory fault. 



Lymph, or lymphoid fluids, are divisible into haemal and 

 neural, the former in turn is composed of two varieties, 

 viz. the pre- or cis-nutritive, and the post- or trans- 

 nutritive, while, for all practical purposes we may regard 

 the neural lymph as one and indivisible under the title of 

 cerebro-spinal. 



Roughly speaking, the kidneys effect the elimination 

 of the haemal lymph, together with the neural lymph of 

 the systemic motor nervature, while the skin, and special 

 neural emanations, effect the elimination, with that excep- 

 tion, of the neural lymph. Lymph, in short, is the fluid 

 which occupies the inter-molecular and inter-granular 

 spaces of organised protoplasm ; therefore, its influence is 

 essential in all developmental processes, so that from the 

 period of unicellular life of the fecundated ovum, it never 

 ceases to perform the offices of passively occupying vacua, 

 small and great, amid the stroma of living structure, and 

 of actively conveying the elements of nutrition to, and of 

 carrying out of, the organism all that is no longer useful, 

 or beneficial, in the currency of its everyday changes and 

 exchanges. Moreover, in all the stages of embryonic life, 

 its presence, in proportionately greater quantity, renders 



