Page:Life and death (1911).djvu/142

 It is this combustion that we have known since the days of Lavoisier to be the source of animal heat. We can easily determine the quantity of heat left by albumen passing into the state of urea, and by the starch, the sugars, and the fats reduced to the state of water and carbonic acid. This quantity of heat does not depend on the variety of the unknown intermediary products which have been formed in the organism. Berthelot has shown that this quantity of heat which measures the chemical energy liberated by these substances is identical with the quantity obtained by burning the sugar and the fats in a chemical apparatus, in a calorimetric bomb, until we get carbonic acid and water, and by burning albumen till we get urea. This result is a consequence of Berthelot's principle of initial and final states. The liberated heat only depends on the initial and final states, and not on the intermediary states. The heat left in the economy by the food being the same as that left in the calorimetric bomb, it is easy for the chemist to determine it. It has thus been discovered that one gramme of albumen produces 4.8 Calories, one gramme of sugar 4.2 Calories, and one gramme of fat 9.4 Calories. We thus gather what a given ration—a mixture in certain proportions of these different kinds of foods—supplies to the organism and what energy it gives it, measured in Calories.

The calculation may be carried out to a high degree of accuracy if, instead of confining ourselves to the broad features of the problem, we enter into rigorous detail. It is only, in fact, approximately that we have reduced all foods to albumen, sugar, and fat, and all excreta to water, carbonic acid, and urea.

The reality is a little more complicated. There