Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 22.djvu/708

690 of caseine called legumine; rice and potato contain as little as about eight per cent of nitrogenous matter, and as much as eighty per cent of starch, the amount of nitrogenous matter and starch in these articles of food being in an inverse ratio to each other. Fatty matter is especially abundant in oats and maize. It is evident, therefore, that there is much in these vegetable articles of food which may take the place of the nitrogenous and oily articles which are supplied in animal food.

There is no essential difference as to chemical composition between vegetable albumen, and fibrine, and legumine, and oily matters, and animal albumen, and fibrine, and caseine, and oily matters; there is no perceptible difference in the albuminose or peptone into which the vegetable and animal nitrogenous substances are alike transformed in the process of digestion; there is no difference in the way in which the vegetable and animal oily matters are emulsified, and then taken up directly into the general circulation of the blood. Nor is it difficult to see how the starch, and sugar, and other non-nitrogenous materials which are peculiar to vegetable bodies are disposed of within the system. The way in which starch is disposed of in the stomach and bowels is not very well made out, and all that can be affirmed with certainty is that a great part of it finds its way into the liver through the portal system of vessels, and is detained there for a time in the form of amyloid substance or glycogen—a detention which is not altogether unaccountable, for, as Dr. Pavy points out, this substance "possesses diametrically opposite physical properties to sugar, being a colloid, and therefore non-diffusible, instead of a crystalloid and diffusible." There is no sufficient reason to suppose that the action of digestion, be that what it may, is always to transform the starch into sugar; for sugar in quantity could not be formed in the stomach and bowels without passing directly into the general circulation, and so out from the blood into the urine by way of the kidneys—without making, that is to say, the phenomena of diabetes a natural state of things instead of an unnatural. Nor is there sufficient reason for supposing that the amyloid substance of the liver is transformed into sugar, for this substance is as readily oxidizable and as fit for force fuel as sugar. Nay, it may be questioned whether sugar itself is the force-fuel which the system is in need of. There is a very rapid generation of lactic acid in the stomach and bowels when sugar is taken as food, and it is not unintelligible that it should be so; for, with the help of a ferment of some sort, grape-sugar is readily converted into lactic acid. Indeed, all that has to be done is for one atom of anhydrous grape-sugar to split up into two atoms of lactic acid. Nor is it unintelligible that a certain part of the starch taken as food should pass, as it would seem to do, not into amyloid substance or glycogen, or into sugar, but first into dextrine, then into sugar, and then into lactic acid: for, as is seen in the list which I show you, there is a close