134 LIFE AND DEATH. 



Liebig thought that the superabundant part, escaping 

 the ordinary process, was destroyed by direct com- 

 bustion. He affirmed, for instance, that nitrogenous 

 substances in excess were directly burned in the blood 

 instead of passing through their usual cycle of vital 

 operations. We might express the same idea by 

 saying that they then undergo an accelerated 

 evolution. Instead of passing through the blood in 

 the anatomical element, to return in the dismem- 

 bered form from the anatomical element to the blood, 

 their breaking up takes place in the blood itself. 

 They save a displacement, and therefore in reality 

 remain external to the construction of the living 

 edifice. Their energy, crossing the intermediary vital 

 stage, passes with a leap from the chemical to the 

 thermal form. Liebig's doctrine reduced to this 

 fundamental idea deserved to survive, but mistakes 

 in minor details involved its ruin. 



Voifs Circulating Albumen. A few years later 

 C. Voit, a celebrated physiological chemist of Munich, 

 revived it in a more extravagant form. He held 

 that almost the whole of the albuminoid element 

 is burned directly in the blood. He interpreted 

 certain experiments on the utilization of nitro- 

 genous foods by imagining that these substances 

 when introduced into the blood were divided as a 

 result of digestion into two parts: the one very small, 

 which was incorporated with the living elements, and 

 passed into the stage of organized albumen, the other, 

 corresponding to the greater part of the alimentary 

 albumen, remained mingled with the blood and 

 lymph, and was subjected in this medium to direct 

 combustion. This was circulating albumen. In this 

 theory the tissues are almost stable ; the organic 



