FUNCTIONAL ASSIMILATION. FUNCTIONAL DESTRUCTION. ORGANIC DESTRUCTION. ASSIMILATING SYNTHESIS.
The extreme importance of nutrition—§ 1. Effect of vital activity—Destruction or growth—Distinction between the living substance and the reserve-stuff mingled with it—Organic destruction—Destruction of reserve-stuff—Destruction of living matter—Growth of living matter—§ 2. The two categories of vital phenomena—Foundations of the idea of functional destruction—The two kinds of phenomena of vitality—Criticism of Claude Bernard—Current views—Criticism of Le Dantec’s new theory of life.—§ 3. Correlation of the two kinds of vital facts—Law of connection—Contradictions in the new theory.—§ 4. The characteristics of nutrition—Its definition—Its permanence—Erroneous idea of the vital vortex—Formative assimilation of reserve-stuff—Formative assimilation of protoplasm—Death, real and apparent.
The Immense Importance of Nutrition.—We now come to the important feature of vitality. All other characteristics of living matter, its unstable equilibrium, its chemical and anatomical organization, the acquisition and the maintenance of a typical form, are only secondary properties, so to speak, subordinate with reference to nutrition. Generation itself is only a mode. Nutrition is the essential attribute of life. It is life itself.
Before we define it a few preliminary explanations are necessary.
The most striking thing in living matter is its growth. An animal, a vegetable, is something which is first more or less minute, and which grows. Its characteristic is to expand—from the spore, the seed, the slip, the egg—it grows.
Whether we are dealing with a cellular element, a plastid, or a complex being, their condition is the same in this respect. No doubt when the animal or plant has reached a certain stage of development its growth is stopped, and for a more or less lengthy period it remains in the adult stage, in what seems to be equilibrium. But even then there is no check in the manufacture of living matter; there is only a compensation between its production and its destruction.
It is important to reduce to order the ideas on this important subject, which at present are confused, inconsistent, and contradictory. In biology grievous confusion reigns.
§ 1. Effect of the Vital Activity. Destruction or Growth?
Distinction between the Living Substance and the Reserve-stuff mingled with it.—The physiology of nutrition has given rise to a vast body of research during the last half-century. Physiological schools, masters and pupils, such as the school at Munich under Voit and Pettenkofer, Pflüger’s at Bonn, Rubner’s, and those of Zuntz and von Noorden at Berlin, and a large number of zootechnical and agricultural laboratories through the whole world have for years past been engaged in analyzing ingesta and egesta, in drawing up schedules of nutrition, in order to determine the course of decomposition and reconstitution of the living material.
If I were asked what, in my opinion, is the most general result of all this labour, I would reply that it has affirmed and corroborated the important distinction which must be drawn between living substance, properly so called, and reserve-stuff. The latter, the reserve-stuff of albuminoids, carbohydrates, and fats, are so intimately intermingled with the living substance that they are in most cases very difficult to distinguish from it.