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For instance, it is part of the function of the liver to bring about chemical changes in albuminous foods which make it possible for the tissues to assimilate these. It also has much to do with bringing about certain chemical changes in sugar or dextrose.
The only representative of the carbohydrates in the plasma is dextrose. This is a variety of sugar, being derived from starch and the different sugars that are eaten. The fat in the plasma is in minute quantities and appears as fine droplets—the form in which it is found in milk.
I shall not bore you with it, but I think you will see in a moment why it is necessary, perhaps why some one who knew thought it would never be used. "What I am getting at now is that some substances with the same chemical formula rotate polarized light to the right, are dextro- rotary, as, for instance, what is known as dextrose.
Lump sugar is practically pure, and therefore a poorer article of diet than any other form of sugar, for man can not live on carbon without salts. Grape sugar and fruit sugar are the same chemically. Another name for them is dextrose, and in the form of dextrose sugar is ready to be taken up by the blood.
It is a chief function of the liver to collect the excess of dextrose from the blood passing through it, and to convert it into glycogen, which it then stores within its cells. It does not, however, separate all of the dextrose from the blood, a small amount being left for supplying the immediate needs of the tissues.
To the first class belong cane sugar, found in sugar cane and beets, milk sugar, found in sweet milk, and maltose, a kind of sugar which is made from starch by the action of malt. The important members of the second class are grape sugar, or dextrose, and fruit sugar, or levulose, both of which are found in fruits and in honey.
Glucose is a food; it can be used for all purposes where sugar is used in degree, at least. And every living person on earth uses sugar as food every day! Our ex-grocer knew all about Hambletonian Ten and Dexter; but dextrine, dextrose and glucose were out of his class. Yet he realized that if sugar could be made from corn, there was a fortune in it for somebody.
Now two varieties of tartaric acid crystallize in forms bearing the relation to one another of object to mirror image. It would seem more reasonable to explain the existence of these two identical, but reversed, varieties of crystal, by assuming the revolution of a single variety in the fourth dimension, than by any other method. There are two forms of sugar found in honey, dextrose and levulose.
Certain snails present the same characteristics as these two forms of sugar. Some are coiled to the right and others to the left; and it is remarkable that, like dextrose and levulose, their juices are optically the reverse of each other when studied by polarized light.
A similar rotation is now familiar in the well-known tests of sugars lævulose and dextrose which rotate plane-polarized light to left and right, respectively.
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