ii2 BIOLOGICAL PHYSICS 



molecular, circulation, and disintegrated by use, their 

 journey into the blood stream is accomplished through 

 the lymph spaces, channels, and vessels : and here comes 

 into view a great and hitherto unanswered question, a 

 question underlying all theories of nutrition and excretion 

 the question of whether these effete and outgoing 

 materials become mixed with the incoming and nutritive 

 materials, and whether a serious seeming error in the 

 "plans of nature" has not been perpetrated. In framing 

 an answer to this question as to the possible contact and 

 admixture of effete, and outgoing, with nutritive, and 

 incoming, materials, within the most vitally important 

 structures of the body, we would regard it as almost a 

 necessary duty to invite the attention of those interested 

 in such problems to the matter, as of greater importance 

 than anything that meantime we could advance at this 

 stage of our enquiry. 



Here, nevertheless, we would in a qualified and tentative 

 way conclude that the removal of the effete materials from 

 the nervous system, as distinguished from the rest of the system, 

 is effected by the peri-, epi-, and endo-neural channels, and 

 that therefore the nervine excretory mechanism is almost, 

 though not quite (the exception being musculo-nervine or 

 neuro-muscular), isolated. In other words, and to make 

 the various steps of the problems involved clearer and 

 more comprehensible, we would recapitulate shortly what 

 we have already advanced, thus the blood circulation 

 carries directly to nearly every structure of the body what 

 nourishment it requires, the great exception being the 

 brain and systemic nervous system, where the blood 

 circulation, instead of delivering the nutritive materials 

 directly to the neuronal structures, lays them down and 

 stores them, so to speak, in the stroma of the neuroglia, 

 where they are taken up as required by the gemmules and 

 dendrons of the nerve cells, and conveyed to the various 

 intra-cellular structures and distally attached nerve fibrils 

 or axons, where, after forming for a time constituent parts 

 of the nervous structures mentioned, they move on to 

 the terminal extremities of these axons, and are detached 

 there as epidermis or as sarcous substance, the latter 

 joining the haemal lymph and returning into the blood. 



