Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 25, 2025
It is also true that want of light causes a diminution of the red and an increase of the imperfect white blood-cells, and that this sometimes results in a disease called leucoemia, while all who live in the dark have pale and waxy skins, and flabby, weak muscles. Thus it would seem that it is the sun that imparts the iron and color to the blood.
Even if they are free from fever, white men in Central Africa often grow listless because of insufficient nutriment. Their flesh-diet is chiefly the white meat of birds, and their blood-cells are really starved by the small amount of nitrogenous matter. A deficient diet in its turn is a frequent cause of diarrhoea and constipation, two of the most common complaints among new chums.
The joint attacked becomes red, swollen, and glossy, so tender that merely pointing a finger at it will send a twinge of agony through the entire body, and the patient lies rigid and cramped for fear of the agony caused by the slightest movement. The tongue becomes coated and foul, the blood-cells are rapidly broken down, and the victim becomes ashy pale.
We call them vascular glands, and we believe that they elaborate colored and uncolored blood-cells; but just what changes they effect, and just how they effect them, it has proved a very difficult matter to determine.
The reptiles and birds, which we group together as the Sauropsids, generally agree in the characteristic structure of the skull and brain, and this is notably different from that of the Mammals. Further, in the Sauropsids the skin is clothed with scales or feathers; in the Mammals with hair. The red blood-cells of the former have a nucleus; those of the latter have not.
They will undergo certain modifications, to become flesh-cells, blood-cells, brain-cells, and so on, adapting themselves to the different organs they are to build up; but they have as much their definite and appointed share in the formation of the body now as at any later stage of its existence.
It is probable that the sensitive and travelling leucocytes of our invertebrate ancestors have powerfully co-operated for millions of years in the phylogenesis of the advancing animal organisation. The red blood-cells have a much more restricted sphere of distribution and activity.
The broken-down scraps of the red blood-cells, together with the toxins of the parasite, are carried to the liver and spleen to be burned up or purified in such quantities that both become congested and diseased, causing the familiar "biliousness," so characteristic of malaria.
It seems to be settled that the red color of blood is owing to iron contained in the red blood-cells, while it is established as a fact that the sun's rays are metallic, having "vapor of iron" as one element.
Specific infectious diseases may be classed as generalized inflammation, as they usually involve the entire body. Inflammation terminates in resolution when the serum is reabsorbed by the blood-vessels and lymphatics, the living blood-cells find their way back into the circulation and the dead cells disintegrate and are taken up by the vessels.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking