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XLVII. On the Function of the Blood in Muscular Work. By C. 

 W. Heaton, F.C.S., Lecturer on Chemistry to Charing Cross 

 Hospital Medical School*. 



MOST of the recent writers on the origin and nature of 

 muscular power seem to have assumed that the oxidation 

 from which it is derived is effected in the tissue itself, outside 

 the walls of the capillaries. Those who, with Liebig, Voit, 

 Ranke, and Playfair, derive the whole of the power from the 

 oxidation of the tissue, find this assumption a necessity ; but it 

 appears to have been adopted also by Fick and Wislicenus, who 

 follow Traubef in assigning the office to the fats and so-called 

 carbohydrates, and by Donders, who attributes it to both classes 

 of compounds. 



Mayer, however, in his now celebrated treatise J, adopted a 

 different view, and argued with extreme ability that all oxidation 

 took place in the blood. Since his time this theory has received 

 some occasional isolated support ; but upon the whole it appears 

 to have been neglected. This is the more curious, since its truth 

 would not only destroy the hypothesis of Liebig, but also the 

 opposite and not less extreme one of Traube. For if force ge- 

 nerated inside a capillary is capable, under the influence of the 

 nerves, of producing muscular contraction outside it, it is ob- 

 viously impossible to assign the origin of that force to either 

 nitrogenous or non-nitrogenous compounds exclusively. Fick 

 and Wislicenus have shown, as Donders had before, that the 

 oxidation of the latter class of compounds contributes something, 

 perhaps the greater part, to muscular work ; but, on the other 

 hand, it cannot be doubted, after Savory's experiments on rats 

 and Voit's upon a dog, that muscular work may be performed 

 as usual in an animal body, even when non-nitrogenous articles 

 are entirely excluded from the food. 



The beautiful experiments of Stokes § have illustrated very re- 

 markably the mode in which oxidation is effected in the blood. 

 He showed that the colouring-matter of the corpuscles, to which 

 he applied the name of cruorine, was capable of acting as a car- 

 rier of free oxygen between the air and the oxidizable materials 

 of the blood. He illustrated this function not only by the action 

 of reducing agents on a solution of the corpuscles, but also by 

 the more striking experiment of allowing the blood-solution to 



* Communicated by the Author. 

 t Virchow's Archiv, vol. xxi. p. 386(1861). 



j Die organische Bewegung in ihrem Zusammenhange mit dem St off - 

 wechsel, 1845. 



§ Proc. Roy. Soc. vol. xiii. p. 355. 



