Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 62.djvu/34

28 it never become integral parts of the machinery. But with the living engine all this is different. The parts of which it is made take up the nutriment or fuel and assimilate it, thus building up new living substance to replace that which is destroyed in the wear and tear associated with activity. This condition of unstable chemical equilibrium is usually designated metabolism, and metabolism is the great and essential attribute of a living as compared with a non-living thing.

It seems childish at the present day, and before such an audience as this, to point out how essential it is to know the chemical structure as well as the anatomical structure of the component parts of the body. But the early anatomists to whom I have alluded had no conception of the connection of the two sciences. Speaking of Vesalius, Sir Michael Foster says: "The great anatomist would no doubt have made use of his bitterest sarcasms had some one assured him that the fantastic school which was busy with occult secrets and had hopes of turning dross into gold would one day join hands in the investigation of the problems of life with the exact and clear anatomy so dear to him." Nor did Harvey, any more than Vesalius, pay heed to chemical learning. The scientific men of his time ignored and despised the beginning of that chemical knowledge which in later years was to become one of the foundations of physiology and the mainstay of the art of medicine.

The earliest to recognize this important connection was one whose name is usually associated more with charlatanry than with truth, namely, Paracelsus; and fifty years after the death of that remarkable and curious personality his doctrines were extended and developed by van Helmont. In spite, however, of van Helmont's remarkable insight into the processes of digestion and fermentation, his work was marred by the mysticism of the day which called in the aid of supernatural agencies to explain what could not otherwise be fully comprehended

In the two hundred and fifty years that have intervened between the death of van Helmont and the present day alchemy became a more and more exact science, and changed its name to chemistry, and a few striking names stand out of men who were able to take the new facts of chemistry and apply them to physiological uses. Of these one may mention Mayow, Lower, Boerhaave, Réaumur, Borelli, Spallanzani, and Lavoisier. Mulder and Holland and Liebig in Germany bring us almost to the present time, and I think they may be said to share the honor of being regarded as the father of modern chemical physiology. This branch of science was first placed on a firm basis by Wöhler when he showed that organic compounds can be built out of their elements in the laboratory, and his first successful experiments in connection with the comparatively simple substance urea have been followed by numberless others, which have made organic chemistry the vast subject it is to-day.