Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume V.djvu/377

 CORPULENCE 373 to hold property for corporate purposes, to sue and be sued, to make by-laws in furtherance of the purposes of its incorporation, and to continue in perpetuity unless restricted to a specified period of time by its charter. The by-laws of a corporation must be reasonable, and in harmony with the general laws of the commonwealth. Corporations in the transac- tion of business are subject to the same rules and responsibilities as natural persons ; and in respect to their officers and agents they occupy the position of master to servants, and must respond to third persons for the injuries caused or done by such officers and agents while trans- acting their business. Every corporation is under the supervision of some visitor, who generally in England is the king, except in the case of inferior ecclesiastical corporations, of which the ordinary is visitor, and of corpora- tions endowed by a founder, in which case he and his heirs are visitors. In the United States the legislature possesses in general this right of supervision. Corporations may be dissolved in several ways: 1. By the death of all their members without successors ; but this mode of extinction can seldom occur. 2. By surrender of the charter by the corporators. 3. By the repeal of the charter ; but this, in the case of private corporations, -is not admissible in the United States unless the right of repeal was re- served when the charter was granted ; such a charter being held to be a contract, and the states being prohibited by the constitution of the United States from violating the obligation of contracts. To obviate this difficulty, some states by their constitutions expressly make all charters subject to repeal. 4. By judgment of some competent court pronouncing a for- feiture of corporate rights for misuser or non- user of franchises. It is a tacit condition of the grant of every corporate franchise that the corporators shall fulfil the purpose or design of their incorporation, and not abuse the franchise conferred ; but a forfeiture for neglect or abuse can only be declared in a public proceeding in- stituted for that express purpose, and cannot be taken advantage of by private persons in suits where the corporate existence may come col- laterally in question. Formerly the law was very strict in requiring corporate business to be done under the corporate seal ; but now these bodies are permitted to contract like natural persons, and the same civil remedies may be had against them. For some wrongs, as the creation or continuance of a nuisance, criminal proceedings may also be had against them. CORPULENCE, a state of excessive fleshiness, due not to unusual muscular development, but to an excess of fatty deposition in the adipose tissues of the body. (See ADIPOSE TISSUE.) The excessive accumulation of fat which con- stitutes corpulence is influenced by three prin- cipal conditions: 1, the rate of physiological waste involved by respiration and exercise ; 2, constitutional tendency; 3, character of diet. In rest 'the consumption of material for muscular force falls to a minimum. Dark- ness, which favors nervous quiet, sleep, which checks interstitial waste, and a high tempera- ture, which lowers the demand for vital heat, and at the same time rarefies the air and redu- ces the respiratory activity, are also favorable conditions for laying on adipose, as those who fatten animals for market well understand. On the contrary, bodily activity is unfavorable to corpulence ; it is accompanied by quick- ened respiration, by which oxygen is more rap- idly introduced, destructive changes increased, and carbon, the main constituent of fat, is car- ried off by the carbonic acid of the expired breath. A low temperature still further favors this tendency by condensing the air respired, so that more oxygen is taken into the system. The later investigations in physiological dy- namics throw still further light upon the de- struction of fat by exercise. According to the views at first maintained by Liebig, all muscu- lar force was attributed to the chemical meta- morphosis of the nitrogenous tissues. But later quantitative investigations into the amount of force expended, and the amount of accompany- ing waste, have shown that the latter is insuf- ficient to explain the former; a surplus of force remains to be accounted for. The prin- ciple of the correlation of forces here comes into play, in the conversion of heat into muscu- lar motion ; and the combustion of fat being a copious source of heat, we see how free bodily exercise is at the expense of fat, and therefore reduces corpulence. It is probable indeed that the source of muscular power assigned by Lie- big (actual metamorphosis of tissue) plays a much less important part in sustaining bodily activity than has been hitherto supposed. Con- stitutional predisposition is moreover a power- ful element in the case, as in some the tenden- cy to leanness is so inveterate that neither rest nor an excessive oleaginous diet will overcome it, while in others the plethoric predisposition is so strong that it is difficult to counteract it by exercise. This so-called predisposition to leanness or obesity depends upon the varying capacity of digesting and assimilating the prox- imate elements of food, and this brings us to the most potent of the influences by which corpulence may be controlled, which is that of diet. (See BANTING.) It was believed until late in the present century that the chemical elements are capable of transmutation in the domain of the vital forces ; but it is now es- tablished that the living system has no such power. It cannot convert one element into another. It cannot generate the materials of which fat is composed ; they must be furnished in food. Yet the organism has a very consid- erable power of transforming alimentary com- pounds, and may even change them from one type to another if the requisite elements are present. The fat series, embracing all the oily elements of diet, are almost pure hydro- carbons, having but a very small proportion of oxygen and no nitrogen. The sugars, gums,