On the digestive ferments and the preparation and use of artificially digested food : being the Lumleian lectures for the year 1880, delivered before the Royal College of Physicians / by Wm. Roberts.

Date:
1880
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the digestive ferments and the preparation and use of artificially digested food : being the Lumleian lectures for the year 1880, delivered before the Royal College of Physicians / by Wm. Roberts. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    pliase of inflorescence and fructification. Here, again, it has been proved that the converting agent is a soluble ferment—the same ferment which, as already mentioned, is attached to the yeast cell— and the same ferment which exists in the small in- testine of animals for a similar purpose. The transformation of store proteids and fats has not been followed out with the same success as that of starch and cane-sugar. But the evidence, as far as it goes, and analogy, point to the conclu- sion that the stores of albuminous and oily matters contained in the seeds, bulbs, and other receptacles of vegetables are subjected to a digestive pro- cess before they are made available for the nutritive operations of the plants, and that the changes thus effected are of the same nature and accomplished by the same agents as those which take place in the digestion of proteids and fats in the ahmentary canals of animals. I have, I think, said enough to show the scope of the evidence and the analogies from which Bernard deduced certain far-reaching generalizations, which I have ventured to surhmarize in my own language in the following propositions : — (1) Digestion, or the process by which crude food is changed into available nutriment, is a function or faculty of capital importance in every form of active life. (2) This function is exercised partly on food brought into proximity with the surface of the or- ganism (exterior, chiefly intestinal digestion) and