Page:Substance of the Work Entitled Fruits and Farinacea The Proper Food of Man.djvu/40

 almost peculiar to the animals that subsist chiefly on saccharine matters."

Chemists generally assert that food is the only means by which azote can be added to the blood (indeed, that only plants have the power of converting unorganized matter, such as the nitrogen of the air, into organized tissue); but some physiologists are of a different opinion. Indeed, Dr. Prout avows his belief that "under certain extraordinary circumstances vital agents . . . may be able to decompose principles which are still considered as elementary; nay, to form azote or carbon." Sylvester Graham declares himself on the same side: "We have no right to assume that the vital forces possess no higher energies of analysis than are exerted by the chemical agents of the inorganic world. We have reason to believe that vitality decomposes the substances which chemists call elements, &c."

Vegetables, if supplied with ammonia, can form gluten out of what would else have been starch. Dr. Prout found albumen in the duodenum, when none was found in the stomach. He supposes the azote (nitrogen) of the albumen to be supplied by the blood, and that the blood which has parted with azote goes into the bile, a secretion which is remarkably deficient in azote.

The vital organ which is called the pancreas is very large in the herbivora, and its peculiar fluid very copious. It is smaller in the wild cat than in the domestic cat, which lives partly on vegetable food. Its use has been unknown. Tiedemann, Gmelin, and other physiologists now maintain that it is (in some sense) a laboratory of azote, which it adds to the chyme; i.e., to the food as dissolved by the stomach. It would seem that the pancreas is a compensating organ, to maintain a sufiicient proportion of azotised compounds in the body. Müller's opinion concerning the organ called the spleen assigns to it a similar action on the lymphatic system, to aid the conversion of the oleaginous principles of food into azotized. If so,—then, whenever the food of an animal does not contain the proportion of chemical elements desirable for the blood, the vital powers bring a partial remedy.

Again, not only by our masticating, but also by our breathing, the nitrogen from the air enters our system. Common air has 76 parts of nitrogen, mixed with 23 of oxygen; and chemists wish us to believe that the sole use of the nitrogen is to dilute the oxygen. But in nature we rather find two or three purposes