Page:Defensive Ferments of the Animal Organism (3rd edition).djvu/58

 the other hand, the decomposition of some disharmonious, unsuitable, material may give rise to some intermediate stages which are the cause of serious disturbances. Here and there a cell would be seriously injured. Complete disintegration could never be effected, either because the cell would refuse to act, or because it would lack the particular agent with which to dissociate the compounds presented to it. All this would lead to numerous possibilities, which would exclude all regularity in the metabolism of the cells, as well as in the general metabolism of the body.

The animal organism prevents all these possibilities by allowing only material which has been put in harmony with the body, and particularly the plasma, to reach the circulation. The nutritive material of the tissue cells, which from this point of view can be considered homogeneous, gives decomposition stages with which the cells have been long familiar. Nothing that is disharmonious appears on the scene. Just as in a workshop, in the production of an article, one machine prepares the material for another, and one workman transfers to another material which is finished up to a certain degree, so do the tissue cells mutually support each other in their task. The cells of the gut and the liver continually act as important sorters for the whole organism. One may imagine the chaos and disturbance which would be 3