CHAPTER VII. 



ULTIMATE PHENOMENA OF ANIMAL NUTRITION. 



M. CL. BERNARD has recently expressed some general views upon 

 the phenomena of nutrition, supported only by a very small 

 number of facts, but certainly true in a degree, and highly 

 interesting. 



According to him, we must altogether reject the idea of direct 

 alimentary assimilation. The histological element he thinks 

 acts not upon the complex substances absorbed by the animal 

 organism, but upon the elements of these substances, which it 

 thus decomposes, not uniformty, but according to its needs, by 

 selecting, as a chemist does in his laboratory, and drawing forth 

 the elements which are indispensable to it from complex 

 compounds with very diversified formulas. The following fact, 

 quoted by Burdach, would support this view : " John has seen 

 seeds perish when sown in powdered silica, with potash and 

 fresh white of egg ; they only germinated when this last was 

 already putrified. Here organic matter only acts as an aliment 

 when it is on the point of returning entirely to inorganic 

 nature." l M. Cl. Bernard has himself observed that, without 

 doubt, the saccharine aliments introduced into alimentatipn 

 favoured the production of the glycogenic*al matter of the liver, 

 but that other bodies altogether different,, such as glycerine, 

 chloroform, etc., did not favour it less. All these bodies simply 

 acted as nutritive excitatives. The hepatic cell appears at first 

 1 Burdach, Physiologic, t. ix. p. 392. 



