The Chemistry of Cookery

hard to obtain a rational physiological view of the modern theory. When its advocates compare our food to the fuel of an engine, and maintain that its combustion _directly_ supplies the moving power, what do they mean? They cannot suppose that the food is thus oxidised as food, yet such is implied. The work cannot be done in the stomach, nor in the intestinal canal, nor in the mesenteric glands, nor in their outlet, the thoracic duct. After leaving this, the food becomes organised living material, the blood being such. The question, therefore, as between the new theory and that of Liebig, must be whether work is effected by _the combustion of the blood itself_ or by the degradation of the working tissues, which are fed and renewed by the blood. Although this is so obviously the only rational physiological question, I have not found it thus stated. Such being the case, the supposed analogy to the steam-engine breaks down altogether; the food is certainly assimilated, is converted into the living material of the animal itself before it does any work, and therefore it must be the wear and tear of the machine itself which supplies the working power, and not that of the food as mere fuel material shovelled directly into the animal furnace. I thus agree with Playfair, who says that the modern theory involves a ‘false analogy of the animal body to a steam-engine,’ and that ‘incessant transformation of the acting parts of the animal machine forms the condition for its action, while in the case of the steam-engine it is the transformation of fuel external to the machine which causes it to move.’ Pavy says that ‘Dr. Playfair, in these utterances, must be regarded as writing behind the time.’ He may be behind as regards the _fashion_, but I think he is in advance as regards the _truth_. My readers, therefore, need not be ashamed of clinging to the old-fashioned belief that their own bodies are alive throughout, and perform all the operations of working, feeling, thinking, &c., by virtue of their own inherent self-contained vitality,