APPARATUS FOR PHYSIOLOGICAL USE. 275 



estimate the whole of the tissue change that has gone on in 

 the body of an animal (No. 3939 in Catalogue). 



There is one result of this I should like to mention. "We 

 could not know beforehand whether the decomposition of 

 the nitrogenous substance went on in muscle and glands 

 at the same rate as actual combustion. It might have 

 been that combustion and decomposition of tissue went 

 on at the same rate, but by experiments with this apparatus 

 it has been found that that is not the case, but that, first of 

 all, the muscle gets split up, and then that the products of 

 the splitting up undergo combustion. The way this has 

 been made out is by giving the animal phosphorus. It is 

 then found that the nitrogenous waste is greatly increased, 

 whereas the excretion of carbonic acid is considerably dimi- 

 nished. This shows that, although the tissues have been 

 split up at a much greater rate than before, yet they have 

 been undergoing combustion at a less rate than before. 

 The consequence of this is, that instead of the animal 

 remaining in a healthy condition, all the tissues, which were 

 formerly nitrogenous, become more or less converted into 

 fat. The reason of this appears to be that the albuminous 

 bodies of which the muscles and glands are chiefly com- 

 posed split up into urea and fat. The urea passes off by 

 the kidneys, and the fat in a healthy animal undergoes 

 combustion and yields carbonic acid and water, which pass 

 off by the lungs. But when these albuminous bodies split 

 up too quickly the whole of the fat which is formed in 

 them cannot be oxidised, and so it remains in the place 

 where it is formed until its accumulation gives to the 

 organs of the body the appearance of having been converted 

 into fat. A somewhat similar result is observed when 

 oxidation is lessened in the tissues, even although they do 

 not split up more quickly than they ought to do. 



This explains a very curious fact which has been long 

 known that persons who have lost a great quantity of 

 blood very often become extremely fat, and in some parts 

 of Germany it is known even to the peasantry, so that 

 when they want to fatten a cow rapidly, instead of giving 

 it more food they bleed it, a very odd thing to do, one 

 would say. The simple reason is, that by taking away a 

 quantity of the blood-corpuscles, which usually carry to the 

 tissues the oxygen which maintains combustion in them, the 



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