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.

  • Roberts, Sir William, 1830-1899.
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 Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    Interstitial Digestion. Both animals and plants lay up reserves, or stores, of food in various parts of their tissues for contingent use, so that if you suddenly withdraw from them their food-supphes neither animal nor plant imme- diately dies—it lives for a certain time on its re- serves. But before these reserves can be made available for the operations of nutrition they must first be converted from their inert and mostly insoluble state into a state of solution and adapta- bility to circulate in the nutritive fluid which constitutes the ahmentary atmosphere of the proto- plasmic elements. This conversion of inert store- food into available nutriment is brought about certainly in some, presumably in all cases, by the same agents and processes as the digestion which takes place in the alimentary canal of animals; and it is this identity in the agents and the processes which Bernard insisted on as the proof of the funda- mental identity of the two kinds of digestion. The storing up of food is carried on to a larger extent in the vegetable than in the animal kingdom owing to the intermittent life of most plants. In their seed, tubers, bulbs, and other receptacles are laid up stores of albumen, starch, cane-sugar and oil—designed primarily for the growth and nutrition of the plant or its offspring—^but which are largely seized on by animals and utilized for their food. Owing to their more continuous life animals store up food less than plants. Nevertheless, they accu-