Page:Defensive Ferments of the Animal Organism (3rd edition).djvu/56

 micro-organisms, for the purpose of limiting their sphere of action or of subduing them, no more convincing picture could be presented to us of the synthesizing capacities of the animal organism. Even the full-grown organism is able at any moment to completely equip a vast army of cells and endow them with special functions.

If the ingested food materials, with their peculiarly disharmonious structure, were passed directly into the circulation and handed over to the cells in this state, then the organism would be subjected to continual surprises. The control of its metabolism would be utterly impossible under such conditions. Sometimes one substance, sometimes another, would predominate in the circulation, and the blood would be correspondingly affected sometimes in one way, sometimes in another. The cells would have to disintegrate all these disharmonious materials. In such a case they would have to be provided with all sorts of arrangements for the continual modification of these materials. Each separate cell of an organism would be in exactly the same state as a unicellular organism. Just as these have to make a selection from amongst the disharmonious substances by which they are continually bathed, so, too, would the cells of the body have to pick out the substances they need, according to the conditions presented. Not only would the work of the single cells be enormously