alone destined to bear, to nourish, to bring into the world, and suckle the 

 new being, the result of conception*. 



The internal, assimilating, or nutritive functions concur in the same 

 end, and all serve to the elaboration of the nutritive matter. The aliment 

 once admitted into the body, is subjected to the action of the digestive or- 

 gans, which separate its nutritive parts ; the absorbents take it up, and 

 convey it into the mass of fluids; the circulatory system conveys it to all 

 the parts of the body, makes it flow towards the organs; the lungs and 

 the secretory glands supply it with certain elements, and deprive it of 

 others, alter, modify, and animalize it; in fine, nutrition, which may be 

 considered as the complement of assimilating functions, whose object it 

 is to provide for the maintenance and growth of the organs, applies to 

 them this animalized substance, assimilated by successive acts, when it has 

 become quite similar to them. 



Several, however, of these functions, serve at once to preserve and to 

 destroy. Absorption, which takes up extraneous molecules to be em- 

 ployed in the growth of the organs, takes up equally the organic mole- 

 cules which are detached by motion, friction, heat, and all the other phy- 

 sical, chemical, and vital causes. The action of the heart and of the 

 blood-vessels sends these fragments, together with the parts truly recre- 

 mentitious, towards the lungs, which, at the same time that they bring 

 about a combination of the nutritive parts with the oxygen of the atmos- 

 phere, separate from the blood the materials which can no longer be em- 

 ployed in nourishing the organs; the same power sends them towards the 

 secretory glands, which not only purify what is liquid, by separating from 

 it that which cannot without danger remain in the animal ceconomy, but 

 which likewise elaborate or prepare peculiar fluids, some of which are 

 results of the act of nutrition, are employed in that act, and impart to the 

 substances on which it is performed a certain degree of animalization, 

 (as to the bile and saliva) while the others seem to be intermediate states, 

 which the nutritive, particles of the food are obliged to undergo, before 

 the complete animalization 5 such are the serous fluids and the fat. 



It might perhaps seem more in conformity to the order of nature, to 

 have combined the account of respiration with that of the circulation by 

 treating of the course of the venous blood, after the action of the absorb- 

 ent vessels, with which the veins have so much analogy. Then to have 

 treated of the phenomena of respiration, or of the conversion of the ve- 

 nous blood into arterial, and of the course of the latter into all the parts 

 of the body, by the action of the heart and arteries; but, the advantage 

 which would be obtained from a method so contrary to the common prac- 

 tice, which is to consider separately the functions of circulation and res- 

 piration, appeared to me too unimportant to justify its adoption. 



The external or relative functions equally connected by their common 

 destination, connect the individual to every thing that surrounds him; 

 the sensations, by warning him of the presence of objects which may be 



* The classification of the functions which RICHF.RAND adopted, with a slight modifi- 

 cation from GRJMAUD, nearly agrees with the one more generally followed by the best 

 modern physiologists. SPREXOKL arranges them into the vegetative, the sensiferous, and 

 the generative. MAGESIUE divides them into functions of relation, functions of nutrition, 

 and functions of generation. LENHOSSEK, professor of anatomy and physiology in the 



classes the functions into those of 



university of Vienna, the latest writer on physiology, classe 

 organic life, of aenvfermis or animal life, and those belonging 



g {.Q generation- Copland. 



