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Sciences awarded the prize for Experimental Physiology. As already 

 recorded, when writing of De Graaf (1662), it may be said that Bernard 

 took up the story in the direct line. I have reproduced from this memoir 

 two figures — the one from a dog, and the other from a rabbit. In the 

 original of the dog Bernard gives two coloured figures showing the 

 pancreas during digestion and at rest in the living animal. He also 

 figures the "granules" of the pancreas that bear his name, and also 

 the glands of Brunner. 



Bernard's work is associated with three great problems — 

 pancreatic secretion, glycogen, and vaso-motor nerves. His discovery 

 of glycogen was not obtained by a frontal attack, he was led to it 

 indirectly. At this time the combined results of histological and 

 chemical investigation tended to show more and more the importance 

 of the cell. Liebig and Wohler were the heads of the German, and 

 Jean Baptiste Dumas of the French school. In fact Dumas talked 

 of the " balance of organic nature." There was supposed to be a 

 complete contrast between animal and vegetable organisms. Indeed, 

 the possibility of the actual formation of fat, or sugar or starch, was 

 scarcely credited. Magendie knew that minute traces of sugar 

 occurred in the blood, and it was supposed that this sugar came from 

 the food. In 1848, Bernard, when studying the absorption of sugar 

 from the intestine, thought that it might have some other source. 

 "With his friend Barreswill — the latter gives his name to a fluid test 

 for grape sugar nearly identical with Fehling's solution — he found 

 that the hepatic vein contained more sugar than the portal vein. 

 Moreover, if an animal be fed on food containing neither starch nor 

 sugar, or if it be starved, sugar is still found in the hepatic vein. 

 The liver therefore, besides forming bile, makes sugar, which it pours 

 into the blood. At one blow the artificial distinction between the 

 animal and vegetable kingdoms was swept away. Of course such a 

 complete reversal of established dogma was not accepted without 

 much controversy. Bernard washed out the blood-vessels of an excised 

 liver with water, until the washings gave no trace of sugar. On 

 exposing the liver for a few hours to its normal temperature, washing 

 out its vessels again, there was an abundance of sugar. There was no 

 denying the fact that animal cells did produce sugar. The next thing 

 was to isolate the substance from the liver. Bernard isolated glycogen 

 by the potash-alcohol process in 1857. This substance was also 

 isolated by Hensen. He sought to find out under what conditions 

 glycogen is formed, and soon he showed the analogy between 

 conversion of glycogen into glucose and of starch into sugar in potato, 

 bulb of hyacinth, &c. He spoke of this conversion as " germination 

 animale." These views led him to study animal heat, its sources and 

 distribution. He saw that the amount of heat is a measure of the 

 chemical activity of cells. Whilst searching for the influence of 



