Page:Life and death (1911).djvu/120

 The second truth taught us by general physiology, a truth which physiology learned from experiment, is enunciated as follows:—''The maintenance of life consumes none of its energy. It borrows from the external world all the energy which it expends, and borrows it in the form of potential chemical energy.'' This is a translation into the language of energetics of the results acquired in animal physiology during the last fifty years. No comment is needed to exhibit the importance of such a truth. It reveals the origin of animal activity. It reveals the source from which proceeds that energy which at some moment of its transformations in the animal organism will be a vital energy.

The primum movens of vital activity is, therefore, according to this law, the chemical energy stored up in the immediate principles of the organism.

Let us try to follow, for a moment, this energy through the organism and to specify the circumstances of its transformations.

Organic Functional Activity, and the Destruction of Reserve-stuff.—Let us suppose then, for this purpose, that our attention is directed to a given limited part of this organism, to a certain tissue. Let us seize it, so to speak, by observation at a given moment, and let us make an examination of the functional activity starting from this conventional moment. This functional activity, like all other vital phenomena, will be the result, as we have just explained, of a transformation of the potential chemical energy contained in the materials held in reserve in the tissue. This is our first perceptible fact. This energy, when disengaged, will furnish to the vital action the means by which it may be prolonged.

There is, then, a functional destruction. There is, at