Page:A Text-book of Animal Physiology.djvu/59

Rh The blood is the source of all the nourishment of the organism, including its oxygen supply, and is carried to every part of the body through elastic tubes which, continually branching and becoming gradually smaller, terminate in vessels of hair-like fineness in which the current is very slow—a condition permitting that interchange between the cells surrounding them and the blood which may be compared to a process of barter, the cells taking nutriment and oxygen, and giving (excreting) in return carbonic anhydride. From these minute vessels the blood is conveyed back toward the source whence it came by similar elastic tubes which gradually increase in size and become fewer. The force which directly propels the blood in its onward course is a muscular pump, with both a forcing and suction action, though chiefly the former. The flow of blood is maintained constant owing to the resistance in the smaller tubes on the one hand and the elastic recoil of the larger tubes on the other; while in the returning vessels the column of blood is supported by elastic double gates which so close as to prevent reflux. The oxygen of the blood is carried in disks of microscopic size which give it up in proportion to the needs of the tissues past which they are carried.

But in reality the tissues of the body are not nourished directly by the blood, but by a fluid derived from it and resembling it greatly in most particulars. This fluid bathes the tissue-cells on all sides. It also is taken up by tubes that convey it into the blood after it has passed through little factories (lymphatic glands), in which it undergoes a regeneration. Since the tissues are impoverishing the blood by withdrawal of its constituents, and adding to it what is no longer useful, and is in reality poisonous, it becomes necessary that new material be added to it and the injurious components withdrawn. The former is accomplished by the absorption of the products of food digestion, and the addition of a fresh supply of oxygen derived from without, while the poisonous ingredients that have found their way into the blood are got rid of through processes that may be, in general, compared to those of a sewage system of a very elaborate character. To explain this regeneration of the blood in somewhat more detail, we must first consider the fate of food from the time it enters the mouth till it leaves the tract of the body in which its preparation is carried on.

The food is in the mouth submitted to the action of a series of cutting and grinding organs worked by powerful muscles;