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Updated: May 23, 2025
How beautifully and admirably simple, with the aid of these discoveries, appears the process of nutrition in animals, the formation of their organs, in which vitality chiefly resides! Those vegetable principles, which in animals are used to form blood, contain the chief constituents of blood, fibrine and albumen, ready formed, as far as regards their composition.
The usual appearance of the aliment of nutrition in the blood is albumen; and in the stomach, which is the dressing-room of our actors, fibrine and casein disguise themselves ingeniously as albumen; trusting to albumen to come forward afterwards as fibrine or casein, when there is either a muscle to be formed, or milk to be produced.
These three nitrogenised compounds, vegetable fibrine, albumen, and caseine, are the true nitrogenised constituents of the food of graminivorous animals; all other nitrogenised compounds occurring in plants, are either rejected by animals, as in the case of the characteristic principles of poisonous and medicinal plants, or else they occur in the food in such very small proportion, that they cannot possibly contribute to the increase of mass in the animal body.
THE LUNGS are formed of two substances: one like gelatine; another of the nature of caseine and albumen, fibrine, cholesterine, iron, water, soda, and various fatty and organic acids. How these varied elements are held together, even science with all its deep searchings has never told. No man, by whatsoever combination of elements, has ever made a living plant, much less a living animal.
In this view, I do not see anything so fit to talk about, or half so interesting, as that which relates to the innumerable majority of our fellow-creatures, the dead-living, who are hundreds of thousands to one of the live-living, and with whom we all potentially belong, though we have got tangled for the present in some parcels of fibrine, albumen, and phosphates, that keep us on the minority side of the house.
But in those aneurysms which are fusiform dilatations of the vessel there is but slight chance of such cure, for the blood sweeps evenly through it without staying to deposit clot or laminated fibrine.
I spare you the others, for many others there are, without counting those which have not yet been discovered I All these things are to be found, I must tell you, in fibrine and albumen, but in such minute quantities that it is scarcely possible to recognize them.
Chemical analysis has led to the remarkable result, that fibrine and albumen contain the same organic elements united in the same proportion, i.e., that they are isomeric, their chemical composition the proportion of their ultimate elements being identical. But the difference of their external properties shows that the particles of which they are composed are arranged in a different order.
It is well known that in this case blood coagulates, and separates into a yellowish liquid, the serum of the blood, and a gelatinous mass, which adheres to a rod or stick in soft, elastic fibres, when coagulating blood is briskly stirred. This is the fibrine of the blood, which is identical in all its properties with muscular fibre, when the latter is purified from all foreign matters.
That substance is whitish, elastic and sticky; and when dried becomes brittle and semi-transparent. It keeps for an unlimited time in alcohol, putrefies very soon in water exposed to the air, and is easily dissolved in a wash of soda or potash. Finally 100 ounces of it contain as follows: Ounces. Carbon 63 Hydrogen 7 Oxygen 13 Nitrogen 17 100 This substance is called fibrine.
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