DR. PROUT ON ANIMAL CHEMISTRY. 
491 
and the further I proceed, the more I am satisfied that they are 
founded in truth; and that they will, sooner or later, in some 
form or other, be established. I purposely avoid details as much 
as possible, as the consideration of these on the present occasion 
would be quite out of the question. 
I mentioned in my last lecture that, excluding water and ad¬ 
ventitious matters, as the earthy basis of bones, &c., the stamina, 
or ground-work of organized beings may be considered as consti¬ 
tuted of three great principles—the saccharine , the oleaginous, 
and the albuminous. Now, as alimentary substances are derived 
from the prganic kingdom, these, of course, must be similarly con¬ 
stituted ; and they may, in fact, be viewed in the same light, or 
as consisting of the same three great classes of substances. If 
this view of the subject, therefore, be correct, it matters little under 
what head we consider these principles—whether, for example, 
as staminal principles, composing animal bodies, or as the aliments 
by which animals are supported ; but as the latter point of view 
is in some respects most convenient for our present purpose, I 
shall consider them in an alimentary point of view. And, first, 
of the— 
1 . Saccharine group .—When speaking of this group of bodies 
in our last lecture, it was observed that the radical law pervading 
them all is, that they are essentially composed of carbon and 
water, or, in other words, that they may be considered as hydrates 
of carbon. In the Philosophical Transactions for 1827, an ac¬ 
count of the analyses of the principal substances of this class is 
given, and the following is a very brief abstract of the results :— 
This class of bodies, like most others perhaps in nature, is 
made up of two great series—the crystallized and the merorgan- 
ized, which, as far as essential composition goes, coincide, or 
run parallel, though their sensible and even their chemical pro¬ 
perties are totally different. These differences are supposed to 
depend chiefly on the presence of minute quantities of foreign 
bodies termed merorganizing bodies; and partly on the different 
modes in which their particles are aggregated. Thus, the highest 
and most perfect crystallized sugar coincides with its merorganized 
parallel, the highest and most perfect form of starch—that, 
namely, from wheat. The same is true with the other varieties of 
sugar, which have their corresponding parallels among merorgan¬ 
ized bodies, as the low sugar of honey or grapes, with the low 
form of starch existing in arrow-root, &c. 
A second most important body belonging to this group of sub¬ 
stances is vinegar. Of this, in the crystallizable form, only one 
variety is known at present—namely, pure acetic acid. But 
there are probably several merorganized varieties, as the lactic 
