48 BIOLOGICAL PHYSICS 



phenomena, such as nutrition, growth, and decay. Water 

 thus is the great vehicle in and by which the necessary 

 pabulum is conveyed to the expectant textures, the medium 

 in which they are dissolved, or with which they are 

 mechanically mixed and prepared for assimilation, and the 

 agency of exchange in the metabolic arrangements con- 

 cerned in interstitial or textural nutrition. We have 

 already written of an incorporative circulation, as being the 

 central circulation in the great series of circulations, or 

 circulatory acts, displayed in the human and allied organ- 

 isms, as well as in all organic forms, and have claimed for it 

 that it is no exception to the rule that all is circulation, but 

 that it is, in particular , the circulation consisting of the 

 molecular , or atomic , movements of the constituent physio- 

 logical and chemical elements of which the living tissues 

 are composed. Water, therefore, must be regarded as the 

 vehicle by which these physiological and chemical elements 

 are conveyed for integrative purposes to the tissues under- 

 going disintegration, or waste, and the medium through 

 whose agency the phenomena of metabolism are effected, 

 and that it acts in some such way as the following, viz. : 

 After solution in, or admixture with, water, the elements 

 of the nutritive plasma are conveyed by the circulatory 

 machinery to the various tissues of the organism, where, 

 by metabolic selection, the necessary nutritive ingredients 

 are taken from the water, detained to repair the disinte- 

 grated and cast-off, or effete, ingredients, which must 

 necessarily have been already, or are now being, swept 

 away by the preceding column of aqueous solvent, one 

 molecule, or atom, replacing another in continuous suc- 

 cession, as the exigencies of tissue waste determine ; 

 hence is secured what we have already insisted on and 

 endeavoured to make clear, that the incoming and fresh 

 are not mixed with the outgoing and effete elements of 

 metabolic change and exchange, and that the phenomenon 

 of autotoxis is thereby averted and made impossible in 

 health. The water, having thus yielded up to the needy 

 tissues its consignment of nutritive or physiologico- 

 chemical plasma, is now at liberty to take or ally itself 

 with and carry away into the lymph spaces and channels 

 the results of tissue waste, and to convey them to where 



