72 ENDOSMOSIS IS NOTHING MORE THAN COMMON CAPILLARY ATTRACTION. 



of diseases have been explained, as also the rationale of some modes of treatment. A 

 premature application of principles ill understood is to be deprecated. On the discov- 

 ery of a new fact, it is not always easy to determine its relation and position in the 

 chain of knowledge ; a confused idea is generally entertained of it ; nor is it until time 

 and experience have abstracted from it whatever was mysterious and doubtful, that we 

 see clearly its true locality in respect of other facts, how they bear upon it, and how it 

 bears upon them. 



236. We conclude, therefore, that endosmosis is not a new power, nor does it bear 

 any peculiar relation to organization ; but that it is a manifestation of capillary attraction. 



237. That, so far as the examination in this memoir has extended, there is no case 

 upon record in which endosmosis has effected a real and undoubted chemical decom- 

 position ; that several cases of such reputed change depend plainly on the action of 

 other agents ; and hence, that those reported instances of the production of secreted 

 fluids by dead membranes, through this power, are fanciful illusions. 



238. The experiments here considered are such as were conceived to be the most 

 important, and those generally referred to, as substantiating conclusions which conflict 

 with that here given. If others be known not subject to these or similar strictures, I 

 am ignorant of them ; such may, by chance, hereafter be found ; the decision now given 

 refers to what have been regarded as actual proofs, and not to contingent evidence. 

 That chemical changes of all kinds occur in tissues and glands, is not to be doubted ; but 

 we must not confound together a change effected in a tissue, and one effected through 

 it. Urine is readily separated from arterial blood in the kidney ; yet would any one 

 expect, on placing blood upon a kidney, that urine would drop through it 1 A candid 

 examination of many of the fashionable applications of endosmosis to physiological func- 

 tions will discover no wide difference between them and this hypothetical case. 



239. It is well known that those who first cultivated this department of science, 

 viewed it as a case of electrical action. In this they did not go far astray ; the ma- 

 chinery being erroneous, though the principle was true. Capillarity is unquestionably 

 an electro-statical phenomenon, and hence will hereafter come to be intimately allied 

 with chemistry. An important and extensive series of effects, which now pass as in- 

 stances of electrical attraction, will be assigned to it ; such as the adhesion of colouring 

 matter and dyes to cloth, the silvering to a looking-glass, the solution of salts, and gen- 

 erally all cases of union where the uniting bodies lose none of their prominent charac- 

 teristics. 



