338 THE ANIMAL AS A PRIME MOVER. 



but the full thermal equivalent of the chemical forces is never pro- 

 duced; in other Avords, the animal body does not act as a thermo- 

 dynamic engine, and very probably the chemical forces produce the 

 external mechanical effects through electrical means." We have now 

 seen how all investigations made before and since that date, so far as 

 interpretable, point to the same conclusion: 1 that the machine is not a 

 heat engine. 



The possibilities of improvement by simulating or paralleling nature 

 are seemingly stupendous. Could the chemical energy of fuel oxidation 

 be directly transformed into dynamic energy; could it even be changed 

 by double or by indirect transformation, as through the intermediary of 

 electricity, and in such manner as to insure a full equivalence of util- 

 izable energy, it is evident that we might anticipate a conversion as 

 economical as we now attain in the transformation of mechanical into 

 electrical energy, and, consequently, many times as large a return for 

 outgo as we at present realize and correspondingly lengthened time of 

 exhaustion of our stores of primary energy. At first thought the pos- 

 sibility of an economic gain in power production, by following nature 

 in energy transformations through processes which involve the organi- 

 zation of a sugar manufactory as a source of fuel supply, may seem 

 somewhat unpromising; but when it is considered that sugars and 

 glycogens are but carbon and water and that the chemist has success- 

 fully attacked many other more unpromising cases, as the synthesis of 

 madder, and of the various other commercial substitutes for natural 

 products, the possibilities, even seen from a financial standpoint, are 

 not apparently absolutely to be ignored. Similarly, could chemical 

 energy be directly and fully transformed into light, where needed, and 

 as effectively as nature performs these operations of energy transfor- 

 mation in the vital apparatus, the enormous expenditure, the fearful 

 wastes, now going on even in our production of out-of-door light by 

 the use of the electric arc would be reduced to a fraction of their pres- 

 ent amounts and to an insignificant fraction of total costs. Could 

 vital energy be identified and brought under control, or could that 

 mysterious energy which is its servant in directing and producing 

 animal power be securely gained and its processes understood and con- 

 trolled, it would seem possible that direct transformations of energy — 

 which probably means by influencing molecular and atomic rather than 

 molar motion — might be made possible to man, and all this impressive 

 and wonderful chain of consequences caused to follow. 



1 Mathematical Papers, Vol. I, lviii, page 505. 



