Elements of Physiophilosophy

by Lorenz Oken

1934. The vessel is no longer a something single, like the last-mentioned or preceding cysts, but double. Every vessel hath two poles.

1935. The organization necessarily produces two kinds of vessels. A vessel, which conducts the mucus to the skin, cannot also convey the air to the intestine. There is consequently a mucus-vessel and an air-vessel, or a water-and an air-vessel, an indifferent and a different.

1936. The mucus-vessel is called absorbent, the air-vessel respiratory duct or trachea.

1937. Air-and absorbent vessel stand in antagonism like skin and intestine, like water and air. The air-vessel is the skin or the branchia, which passes to the intestine, the absorbent vessel is the intestine, which passes to the air; the one the intestinal branchia, the other the branchial intestine.

1938. So long as intestine and skin were one in kind, this vascular process was in every situation. With their separation therefore the vascular structure has of necessity originated between two opposed situations. There is no point in the skin and none in the intestine, where there might not be an air-and a water-vessel, a respiratory and absorbent duct.

1939. There are therefore numerous vessels, and consequently a Vascular system.

1940. Air-and water-vessel must abut against each other; because they are polar, because the one leads to this place and the other to that.

1941. The system of water-and air-ducts can form no closed vascular system; for they only grow towards each other, as did formerly intestine and skin.

1942. They would not have originated if both cysts had not separated from each other. These vessels are not therefore to be met with in animals that have no intestine. The transition of the water-into the air-ducts takes place in the higher animals through the union of the thoracic duct with the subclavian vein, which conveys the blood directly to the lungs.

1943. The vascular system is properly the primo-cellular tissue, which occupies the middle, and at whose extremities the two cysts remain approximated, in order that they may continue to live.