CHAPTER VI. 



OF LIVING LIQUIDS. 



FOR centuries the humourists and the solidists have filled the 

 world, we mean the small physiological and medical world, with 

 their discords, with their furious strifes. As in all long wars, 

 there has been in this many a peripetia. Sometimes the triumph- 

 ant humours submerged their adversaries ; sometimes these, offer- 

 ing resolute front with their serried ranks, seemed to have fixed 

 victory for ever to their banners. Observation and experience 

 have ended by imposing on the belligerents their sovereign 

 arbitrament. It is at present demonstrated that between the 

 solids and the liquids of every organism there is less difference 

 than had long been believed. The solids come forth from the 

 liquids ; they come forth from them incessantly and return unto 

 them. Finally, between the solids or anatomical elements and 

 the living liquids, that is to say, the blastemas [blastemata] and 

 the plasmas [plasmata], there is a great analogy of composition. 



The name of blastema is given to every living liquid, that is to 

 say, endowed with nutritive mollecular movement and interposed 

 between anatomical elements. The plasmas are also living liquids, 

 but circulating in canals, the blood and the lymph of animals 

 thus circulating. Blastemas and plasmas have a great analogy 

 with each other if we look at them in a general manner. They 

 both are living ; they both equally contain materials of assimi- 

 lation destined for the anatomical elements, and materials of 

 disassimilation which come forth therefrom, crystalloidal sub- 

 stances in process of transforming themselves to become assimi- 

 lable or organisable albuminoidal substances; and albuminoidal 



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