SOME FACTS CONCERNING DIET. 
479 
The laws or phenomena of the variation of the forms of animals, 
of reversion, and of hereditariness, were traced : a parallel order of 
law was shown to exist in the variation of textures, tissues, and 
so-far ultimate cell-elements of living beings, to the laws of the 
variation of animal forms themselves. Absolutely " specific " 
natures did not exist, but " gradation " of series. Time must be 
allowed. "Overlapping" of animal organs, "overlapping" of 
earlier types of tissue, and earlier cell-conditions in the at-present 
existing animals : relation of this to some diseases. The nature of 
the deviation of the forms and longevity of the cell-growths, 
which exist in consumption, cancer, &c, must be studied in a 
parallel method to that which the naturalist pursues in his study 
of the correlatable variation of animal forms. Thirdly, facts and 
laws relating to the chemistry of vegetables and animals were 
traced, together with the place of the inorganic elements of the 
simpler organic, and of the compound-organic bodies, of the animal 
kingdom ; the vast atomic weight of the latter. The plasma, cells, 
and tissues of the body, were synthetical; vital " selectiveness " 
of cells, and the so-far ultimate plasma, a "polarity." Chemical 
law, as our view enlarges, embraces in one series, the inorganic, 
the organic, and the vital. Fourthly, the lecture treated on the 
elements of food as affecting the forms and tissues, cells and 
plasma of animals ; known phenomena and results led, by analogy 
and research, to more extended discovery : on primitive foods, as 
those of India; on "nascent," or other states of combination of 
the elements of food, as of mineral waters, cod-liver oil, &c. ; the 
vast power which certain states of combination of the elements, 
have over the tissues of the body ; on the mineral elements of 
food ; their great place in the life and history and well-being of 
animals and man ; on cravings for special foods. The sea yields 
both mineral elements and combinations of food of the greatest 
power over man's most prevailing decay — scrofula and consump- 
tion. Hereditariness, in some instances, has been created by 
external physical conditions; but it has, to some degree, been 
arrested ; hence the eager search for those elements in food which 
should justly co-ordinate and sustain the tissues and body from 
deviations into disease. 
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