EXTRACT XLVII. 



ON THE BLOOD WHAT IS IT? AND WHAT 

 DOES IT DO? 



THE theme expressed by these words is, of course, far 

 too extensive and arguable to be compressed into less 

 than volumes, and too wide-reaching to come within the 

 purview of any mere essayist. We therefore, in approach- 

 ing the subject, merely intend to make out a few of its 

 more salient features in " bird's-eye view " manner for 

 biologico-topographical purposes, so to speak, so as to be 

 able to fit it into the general plan of our already executed 

 sketch-and-patch-work. 



The blood may be described as the great central 

 organic and inorganic fluid emporium of the body, into 

 which enter the pristine or fresh nutritive pabulum as 

 transmitted from the alimentary canal, and the residual 

 lymph or waste material gathered from every tissue and 

 structural component of the living and working organism, 

 conveyed hither by appropriate vasculatures, and then 

 circulated by cardiac dynamic agency through an all- 

 pervading systemic series of elaborately organised channels 

 to every part of that organism, there to be made available 

 for the nutrition of all its parts. It is a fluid, therefore, 

 of a most composite character, inasmuch as it thus consists 

 of materials representing every phase of physiologico- 

 chemical, or chemico-physiological, union, admixture, and 

 condition, and every stage of chemico-dynamic activity 

 and molecular potentiality, so to speak from the physio- 

 logically integrative and organic to the pathologically 

 disintegrative or inorganic the extremes of dynamicism 



