BIOLOGICAL PHYSICS 



nutrition, growth, and cell life-work generally of each 

 individual animal ; in other words, the sympathetic nervous 

 system must be regarded as co-extensive with the living 

 fibro-cellular structures of the animal body, whose indivi- 

 dual cell vital energy it supplies, and whose united cell 

 life-work it directs in the performance of organic function, 

 for the accomplishment of the ends necessitated by its 

 environment, and its destined purpose in the execution 

 and economy of " nature's plan." The vital physics 

 involved in the performing of sympathetic nerve functions 

 illustrate the continuation in every living organism of 

 the great process of circulation within the domain of 

 nutritive action, and displays that process reduced to 

 the disposal of atomic quantities, or proportions, in the 

 " give and take," the integration, and disintegration ; the 

 synthesis and analysis continually occurring in living 

 tissue one atom following another, and one replacing 

 another, as the chemico-physical processes of life and vital 

 atomic friction determine in the kaleidoscopic arrange- 

 ments and re-arrangements of living matter. 



Moreover, that vital force, or energy, which constitutes 

 ///"<?, animal and vegetable alike, circulates through fibrous 

 media and along atomic lines, provided by the ultimate 

 atomic, or molecular, disposition of vitally disposed matter, 

 amid the profuse, but ordered, array of the cell textures of 

 organic tissues. Circulation, on definite lines, and along 

 definite paths, thus characterises the movements of both 

 living matter and vital energy in the process of nutrition 

 in the maintenance of the individual cell life, as well as in 

 the communal arrangement and collective working of 

 the cells, in organised groups, as individual plants and 

 animals, as, for example, in the amoeboid mono-cellular 

 organism, or the primal organised unit. 



The normal, or perfect, physiological working of this 

 law of circulation, must, therefore, be regarded as the 

 sine qua non of health, and as requisite for enabling both 

 the cell unit and the cell combination to perform the 

 peculiar and intrinsic work, for which it and they are 

 respectively adapted, and called upon by nature to exe- 

 cute. Any disturbance of this circulation must, in like 

 manner, be attended by pathological consequences, of 



