Drinking-water and ice supplies and their relations to health and disease / by T. Mitchell Prudden.

  • Prudden, T. Mitchell (Theophil Mitchell), 1849-1924.
Date:
1891
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Drinking-water and ice supplies and their relations to health and disease / by T. Mitchell Prudden. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

    24/168
    It would require the scientist's knowledge, the poet's insight, and a master's pen to por- tray the wonderful changes and vicissitudes of a single drop of water, as in its own form it soars in the clouds, or falls in rain, or yields itself to the thirsty earth ; to trace its trans- mutation into a vital factor of a living cell in animal or plant ; to show, how wooed by the rootlet in the soil to its embrace, with what silent but resistless force its atoms are torn asunder, and find themselves at length in new combination, swaying in the sunshine as a part of petal, leaf, or stem. And so it would seem that while the great mass of the old primitive nebula has sunk to rest at last in the solid rock, or has become pent up still uncooled at the earth's centre, that poor residuum which swept over the cool- ing continents as water with such resistless force for so many ages, and those other ele- ments which were called by a more exalted destiny to share in the expression of life, are still ceaselessly at work in shaping those factors which make our world more than a mere mass of inanimate matter.