Читать книгу Popular Books on Natural Science - Bernstein Aaron David - Страница 10

Thus we have seen that the human body is vital blood, transformed and solidified. Now, blood is food transformed; food consists of primary elements prepared and changed by nature; hence, man himself is primary matter transformed and vivified.

But the human race being thousands and thousands of years old, and there being upon the earth besides man the whole of the animal kingdom, developing, preserving, and nourishing itself bodily like man; the question arises: Whence do they all come, these primary elements that are obliged forever to undergo transformation before they can become animated vital matter? Do these primary elements not incessantly decrease during the long process of their being changed into plants and consumed by man and animal, in order to form human and animal bodies afterwards?

The answer to this interesting question has been given already. The human body is not framed or created anew at every moment by food; but it is at every moment, that small particles of the human body die. These particles are returned to mother earth from which they sprang, thus going back to the primary elements.

It is not only those who are dead, that render to the earth what belongs to her, that return to nature what she gave them; but in a far greater degree it is the living, that pay their debt to nature.

Man's body is not his own; nature has lent it to him but for a short term of service; then nature wrests her loan back from him. Thus must man, spite all his pride, accept her never-ceasing offer; daily he must borrow and daily he must repay in part, until the moment comes when he borrows for the last time, the moment he expires; and dying he leaves it to those around his bedside, to pay his last debt to earth.

Is it not wonderful? His own blood is the messenger that daily carries new loans to him, and, in the shape of transformed food, of transformed elements of nature, equips his body. But his own blood is at the same time also his cashier, who, having rendered him service, takes the loan away, by secreting from the body elements that are thus returned to nature.

With every revolution of the blood the body is supplied with transformed food, which is immediately changed into vital parts of the body; with every return of the blood waste matter is carried off and deposited, where it may be thrown out.

The blood carries waste matter to the kidneys that they may send out of the body, in the shape of urine, waste nitrogen, mixed with a part of the phosphate of lime, that served to form bones and teeth, but is now useless. The blood, besides, secretes perspiration through the skin. This is a liquid containing water, hence oxygen and hydrogen; but is moreover mixed with various other waste substances of the body, as for example, carbonic acid, nitrogen and fat. Chiefly, however, the blood is employed in carrying waste carbon to the lungs, so that they may, by the process of respiration, exhale carbonic acid, a gas which would prove of deadly effect if remaining in the lungs too long, or if inhaled.

The quantity of man's secretion per day is by no means small. It amounts to the fourteenth part of his own weight: nay, more – the weight of his perspiration alone, secreted partly by evaporation in the shape of gas, partly as a liquid in drops, amounts during twenty-four hours to nearly two pounds.

Secreted substances have lost all the qualities of transformed and vital matter. They return to the primary elements and serve as food principally to plants, which before had offered those very same substances as food to man.

It is in this manner that the great circulation of matter in nature takes place. From the lifeless primary elements to the plant; from the plant, in the shape of food, to animal and man; from these, as waste substances, back again to the primary elements, there to begin anew a circulation, by means of which inanimate elements are reanimated, and vital elements made lifeless again; that is, life changed again into death.

And it is in this circulation that our "Nutrition," or, more precisely, the "Change of Matter in Man," consists, an important link in the life-preserving chain of nature.