Page:Life and death (1911).djvu/148

 Liebig thought that the superabundant part, escaping the ordinary process, was destroyed by direct combustion. He affirmed, for instance, that nitrogenous substances in excess were directly burned in the blood instead of passing through their usual cycle of vital operations. We might express the same idea by saying that they then undergo an accelerated evolution. Instead of passing through the blood in the anatomical element, to return in the dismembered form from the anatomical element to the blood, their breaking up takes place in the blood itself. They save a displacement, and therefore in reality remain external to the construction of the living edifice. Their energy, crossing the intermediary vital stage, passes with a leap from the chemical to the thermal form. Liebig's doctrine reduced to this fundamental idea deserved to survive, but mistakes in minor details involved its ruin.

Voit's Circulating Albumen.—A few years later C. Voit, a celebrated physiological chemist of Munich, revived it in a more extravagant form. He held that almost the whole of the albuminoid element is burned directly in the blood. He interpreted certain experiments on the utilization of nitrogenous foods by imagining that these substances when introduced into the blood were divided as a result of digestion into two parts: the one very small, which was incorporated with the living elements, and passed into the stage of organized albumen, the other, corresponding to the greater part of the alimentary albumen, remained mingled with the blood and lymph, and was subjected in this medium to direct combustion. This was circulating albumen. In this theory the tissues are almost stable; the organic