Page:Life and death (1911).djvu/206

 the vital medium were the conditions of the ''juste milieu''. Water is wanted, there must not be too much or too little. Oxygen is necessary, and also in certain proportions. Heat is required, and for that, too, there is an optimum degree. Certain chemical compounds are needed and, in this respect too, there must also be optima proportions.

Water is a constituent element of the organisms. They contain fixed proportions for the same tissue, proportions varying from one tissue to another (between 2/3 and 9/10). The cell of a living tissue requires around it an aqueous atmosphere, formed by the different juices of the organism, the interstitial liquids, the blood, and the lymph. We are deceived by appearances when we distinguish between aerial, aquatic, and land-dwelling animals, and when we speak of the air, the water, and the land as their natural environment. If we go to the bottom of things, and fix our attention on the real living unities, on the cells of which the organism is composed, we shall find around them the juices, rich in water, which are their real environment. If these juices are diluted or concentrated the least in the world, life stops. The cell, the whole animal, falls into a state of latent life, or dies. "All living beings are aquatic," said Claude Bernard. "Beings that live in the air are in reality wandering aquariums," said another physiologist. "No moisture, no life," wrote Preyer. The environment must contain water, but it must contain it in certain proportions. In the higher animals there is a mechanism which works automatically to keep at a constant level the quantity of water in the blood. Researches on the lavage of the blood (A. Dastre and Loye) have clearly shown this.