Heredity, health and personal beauty.

  • Shoemaker, John V. (John Veitch), 1852-1910.
Date:
1890
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Heredity, health and personal beauty. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

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    aspects. Until one has grasped and firmly holds the central idea that all life is fundamentally represented by different kinds of cells, which also produce after the manner of their kind, through various transformations, he fails to obtain possession of the clue which leads to perception of many of the conse- quences which environ living things. The old doctrine of the naturalist was that all life is derived from an egg. The doctrine of the modern naturalist is that all life proceeds from a cell, for an egg is nothing but a complex, or, as he would call it, a dif- ferentiated cell. It is the germinal vesicle of the specialized cell of the egg that fundamentally contains life. All else of the egg, in yelk and albumen, is mereby concentrated proteid food for the nourishment of its growing inmate, or shell for its protection during the period of incubation. In both animals and vegetables, from the lowest organisms, consisting of a single cell, to the highest manifestations of life in each, consisting of untold numbers of cells, the unit of life is the cell, capable, in health, through unknown laws, of reproducing its kind, and of changing its manifestations of kind in the for- mation of varying products. Bones, marrow, cartilage, tissues of all sorts in the human body are nothing but the final tempo- rary resting-stage of cells which have assumed protean forms and functions. Even the blood itself, through which the whole organism is revivified, is to be regarded pl^siologically as a tissue. A tissue more plastic than the others, its flow is through ap- pointed channels, bearing with it cells consisting of red and white corpuscles, the former of which, as they move along with the curi'ent, have the power of renewing oxygen in the other tissues, while the latter, known as leucocytes, or wandering cells, with distinct power of motion, can become saprophytes, or cells acting as the scavengers of the circulation. From the cradle to the grave there is no absolute resting- stage of life, whether in the single cell or in the organism as a