506 BIOLOGICAL PHYSICS 



and adynamicism characterising the behaviour of the 

 sanguineous molecule in its relations to the operation of 

 the laws of metabolism and the maintenance of vital 

 cohesion and structural continuity or life. 



The blood may fairly and truly be regarded as equally 

 composed of nutritive plasma and post-nutritive or dis- 

 integrated material, both being, or having been, emptied 

 into the common stream, the former to meet the wants 

 of worn-out or wasted tissue, the latter to be still made 

 subservient, so far as it can be, to the wants of the 

 organism, or excreted as no longer utilisable, or, it may 

 be, hurtful. The processes of digestion and assimilation 

 may be said to have energised or vitalised the former, 

 while the process of vital exercise, organic tear and wear, 

 has de-energised or de-vitalised the latter. 



The process of vitalisation of the blood plasma 

 is accomplished in the long series of changes through 

 which it passes in its reduction from the raw food 

 elements to its integration by the tissue elements, and 

 consists, or results, in the conversion of much of it 

 into homogeneous liquor sanguinis and granules, corpus- 

 cles, lymphocites, and whatever else of organised character 

 is assumed by, or detectable in, its circulating materials. 

 This description, of course, only applies to its proper 

 alimentary part, the other, or proper lymphatic part, being 

 mingled with it after its collection from the lymph spaces 

 and its subjection to a kindred process of glandular or 

 organic assortment, so far as its devitalised materials can 

 lend themselves to such a process ; lymphocitosis even 

 here being possible by the hasmogenetic function of the 

 bone marrow and lymphatic glands proper. The blood 

 so constituted can, consequently, not be physiologically 

 divided into its respective elements of, or distinguished 

 as, new alimentary materials and old proper lymphatic 

 elements, except by colour. We must, therefore, at all 

 times remember that in the human blood we have clini- 

 cally to deal with a fluid everywhere containing and 

 circulating much devitalised and adynamic material, as 

 well as the future nutritive pabulum of the tissues, 

 vitalised and dynamic with the energy of life, and capable 

 of assuming every form of organisation to be met with 



