THEORY OF VITAL COHESION. Otf 1 



other malignant diseases termed putrid, chemical 

 action commences, even before the entire extinc- 

 tion of vitality.* If then it be true, that the vital 

 force of animals, and their power of resisting the 

 laws of dead matter, be in proportion to the quantity 

 of caloric that passes through their tissues, what 

 shall we say of those physiologists who have 

 written so many works on medical science, with- 

 out even attempting to explain the office of heat 

 in the economy of life, or what the blood receives 

 while passing through the lungs, and what it 

 loses while circulating through the ultimate tissues 

 of the body ? 



The wonderful activity and flow of spirits that 

 characterize the period of youth, are owing to the 

 rapidity of nutrition and growth. Like birds, chil- 

 dren are in a state of perpetual motion during 

 health ; and notwithstanding the smallness of 

 their locomotive organs, many of them will run 

 for hours without exhaustion. For the same rea- 



* The extravasations of blood that take place during scurvy, 

 the latter stages of typhus, and other malignant diseases, including 

 the serous portion of the blood effused in dropsy, and which 

 forms the rice water discharges of cholera, are owing to the broken 

 down condition of the solids, and diminished cohesion of the ca- 

 pillary vessels, at a time when the nutritive process is nearly sus- 

 pended. The effusion of blood and serum into the ventricles of 

 the brain in many cases of apoplexy is not the cause, but an ef- 

 fect of weakened cohesion of the vessels, which also constitutes 

 the hemorrhagic and dropsical diatheses. In cases of chronic in- 

 flammation of the brain and other organs, their texture becomes 

 softened in proportion as the nutritive process is diminished. 



