SYMPATHETIC NERVOUS SYSTEM 413 



occupies organically the gap existing between the termina- 

 tion of the haemal circulatory economy, on the one hand, 

 and the beginning of the lymphatic collecting mechanism 

 and circulation on the other. A metabolic "dumping 

 ground," so to speak, being thus provided for both the 

 incoming, or nutritive, and the outgoing, or effete, circu- 

 latory materials. 



Nutrition, thus carried on, secures an atoxic, or 'non- 

 autotoxic, condition of the pabulum supplied to the 

 various textures nourished, inasmuch as the effete and toxic 

 materials of the disintegrating textures are moved on and 

 eliminated from them by, and before, the inflow of the 

 fresh, or substitutive, material with which they are re- 

 placed the one continuous circulatory movement sufficing 

 for the necessities of the processes of disintegration and 

 integration of the tissue involved in every, even molecular, 

 act of nutrition. 



Nutrition, consequently, may be regarded as the process 

 of organisation in more or less permanent form, or the 

 reorganisation of organic, or organisable, materials to meet 

 the losses and fill up the vacua dependent on disintegra- 

 tion, and the wasting effects of " tear and wear." The first 

 nutritive act of every organic unit must, therefore, date 

 from, or coincide with, the earliest period of independent 

 organic existence, and be dependent upon the selective 

 and integrative operation of sympathetic nerve energy or 

 organisable matter, by and through the inherited or trans- 

 mitted sympathetic, or vital, nerve energy perpetuated in 

 the fecundated ovum and kariokineted cell bodies. 



Every cell must thus be looked upon as embodying 

 the principle of life ', and capable of sustaining a separate 

 existence, in virtue of its being vitalised and sustained 

 by its inherent and transmitted sympathetic nerve energy; 

 its parentage and environment determining whether its 

 life-work is to be individual or communal. 



The sympathetic nervous system, of all the systemic 

 nervous system bearing animal creation, must, conse- 

 quently, be regarded as composed of every non-systemic 

 nerve cell within the individual animal, and, therefore, 

 that it must operate through and by these cells in the 

 performance of all organic operations concerned in the 



