The advantage of warm clothing : no. 5 of deposits in the Savings' Bank of Wisdom, made in behalf of working men and women.

Date:
[between 1850 and 1859?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The advantage of warm clothing : no. 5 of deposits in the Savings' Bank of Wisdom, made in behalf of working men and women. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    7/36 (page 5)
    THE LITING BODS A LABOEATOET. poured blue vitriol in water, and an acid, a par- tition wall of pipe-clay standing between. The dilute acid and the zinc were slowly turning into white vitriol, which remained dissolved away in the water; but out of this new-made white vitriol there flowed a power, which was conveyed along a wire, and which made a needle, hung up on a pivot before me, twitch from side to side, almost as if it had been a living thing. I was told that this power set free in the solution, in consequence of the changes brought about there, would run along the wire to the distance of a hundred, or even of a thousand miles, and would there make another needle work and twitch in the same way. In short, I was looking at the electric telegraph at work, and learning that the agent which made the signal afar, was simply a power that had been hidden away in the different substances the chemist put together in the metal chambers, and that was set free and enabled to operate in the production of independent motion, so soon as those substances acted upon one another, and altered the form and state in which each was existing. Now, my good friend, your living body, and my own, are laboratories, in which changes of precisely the same kind are constantly brought about; your living body, and my own, are made of an enormous quantity of separate chambers and vessels, very small it is true, but nevertheless such as can be seen quite distinctly when they are looked for with the micros- cope. In these small chambers and vessels different kinds of substances are thrown together, exactly as the zinc, and acid, and blue vitriol are in the labora- tory-chambers of the electric telegraph. The chambers and vessels of the living laboratory lie between meshes of the supply-pipes of the body, and it is indeed their minute cavities which are drenched by the circulating streams of the dissolved food, (see Value of Oood Food,^^ page 10) and in which that dissolved food gets to be transformed into flesh and fat, gristle and