Читать книгу The Body at Work: A Treatise on the Principles of Physiology онлайн

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The field of physiology embraces the phenomena exhibited by all living things, whether plants or animals. The vegetable physiologist works in one part, the comparative physiologist in another. The work of the human physiologist is more limited in scope. Yet there are few problems relating to Man’s mechanism concerning which the physiologist can have direct knowledge. His theories are based upon the results obtained by experimenting upon animals.

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Protoplasm was defined by Huxley as “the physical basis of life.” It is the material substance which lives. There is no life in anything which does not consist of, or is not supported upon, or permeated by a system of filaments of protoplasm. Huxley’s definition indissolubly links in thought protoplasm and life. But it is doubtful whether the definition is in any sense axiomatic. The adjective “physical” has too narrow a range. If the biologist could say to the chemist, “Here is a substance which was alive. If I could restore to it the energy which it has lost, if I could impart to it the movement which I recognize as life, it would again be alive,” he would offer the chemist a substance susceptible to the methods of his science, something which he could analyse. If, approaching the physicist with a group of chemical products, he could say, “Into these protoplasm broke up on dying. I cannot assure you that while it was alive they were combined into molecules within your meaning of the term. There may be no such ‘substance’ as protoplasm in the sense in which you understand the word, but so long as this mass lived these various familiar compounds were bound together in a supermolecular form. Death was their falling apart. If I could cause them to recombine, they would be alive,” he would give the physicist a problem within the range of his methods. The physicist could devise a method for measuring these units. The science which can weigh an electron, the thousandth part of an atom, need not fear failure in its attempt to gauge the size of units of structure composed of groups of heavy molecules, albumins, globulins, and other proteins,ssss1 with the inclusion, perhaps, of fats, sugars, inorganic salts. But herein lies the biologist’s dilemma. He cannot assert that there exists a homogeneous substance, protoplasm. He cannot assert that there exists a definite tectonic grouping of heterogeneous substances which, so long as it is maintained, constitutes a physical basis capable, and alone capable, of exhibiting the phenomena of life. Protoplasm is still a hypothetical substance—a name. Truly, in the absence of nitrogen-containing compounds of very complicated chemical constitution there is no life. All living things yield on chemical analysis approximately the same nitrogenous substances. No one can say whether the capacity for living is dependent upon the molecular—that is to say, the chemical—constitution of the basis, or whether it is dependent upon the arrangement of its molecules, its form. It is even open to question whether instability, the capacity for incessant change, both in chemical composition and in form, be not the condition which differentiates living matter from dead. “Physical basis” is too hard a term for this elusive concept of the matter which exhibits life.