An experimental inquiry into the nutrition of animal tissues / by William Marcet.

  • Marcet, W. (William), 1828-1900.
Date:
1874
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An experimental inquiry into the nutrition of animal tissues / by William Marcet. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    direction throughout its mass with a multitude of minute channels charged with the material destined to its nutrition, to which the albumen belonged. It might be objected that a small quantity of blood was possibly left in the tissue after slaughtering, which would account for the presence of albumen in the water in which the meat was steeped; but meat from slaughtered animals is perfectly free from blood. On triturating minced ox-flesh with salt water I could not find any blood-corpuscles by subject- ing various portions of the mass to microscopal examina- tion, while on adding one or two drops of serum contain- ing some blood-corpuscles to a few ounces of the pulpy mass, and agitating the whole together, the blood-cor- puscles could be detected most readily. In the tissue of the heart of the ox, however, I usually found small quan- tities of blood, and had to give up determining the albu- men in extracts of that organ because of the results being too high on that account. On these occasions I had no difficulty in detecting the presence of blood. Returning to my subject, I hope to have succeeded in showing that muscular tissue consists of a solid material either porous or permeated by inter-cellular passages con- taining an albuminous fluid, and that the constituents of the solid material are bound together in every molecule by a force similar to that which connects gelatine and water in a jelly. ON THE MODE OF NUTRITION OF TISSUES. A tissue consists of a solid portion containing a fluid nutritive material within its mass. It must appear obvious at the outset that if the solid portion is colloid, the material for its formation must also be colloid; indeed it is well known that albumen, a thoroughly colloid sub- stance, takes a considerable share in the process of nu- trition. I shall show that the phosphoric acid, together with the small quantity of potash (and, we may assume, also the magnesia), which enter into the composition of