138 ORIGIN OF THE BILE. 



its amount, ought to be taken into consideration, suffers 

 not the slightest change in passing through the liver or 

 kidneys ; we find it in every part of the body with the 

 same appearance and the same properties. These or- 

 gans cannot be adapted for the alteration or decomposi- 

 tion of the substance from which all the other organs of 

 the body are to be formed. 



40. From the characters of chyle and lymph, it ap- 

 pears with certainty, that the soluble parts of the food or 

 of the chyme acquire the form of. albumen. Hard- 

 boiled white of egg, boiled or coagulated fibrine, which 

 have again become soluble in the stomach, but have lost 

 their coagulability by the action of air or heat, recover 

 these properties by degrees. In the chyle, the acid re- 

 action of the chyme has already passed into the weak 

 alkaline reaction of the blood ; and the chyle, when, 

 after passing through the mesenteric glands, it has 

 reached the thoracic duct, contains albumen coagulable 

 by heat ; and, when left to itself, deposits fibrine. All 

 the compounds of proteine, absorbed during the passage 

 of the chyme through the intestinal canal, take the form 

 of albumen, which, as the results of incubation in the 

 fowl's egg testify, contains the fundamental elements of 

 all organized tissues, with the exception of iron, which 

 is obtained from other sources. 



Practical medicine has long ago answered the ques- 

 tion, what becomes in man of the compounds of prote- 

 ine taken in excess, what change is undergone by the 

 superabundant nitrogenized food ? The blood-vessels 

 are distended with excess of blood, the other vessels 



