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These blood-tubes running from the walls of the food-tube to the heart are called veins; and the other tubes through which the heart pumps the blood all over the body are called arteries. If you will spell this last word "air-teries," it may help you to remember why the name was given to these tubes ages ago.
We try to help nature instead of thwarting her. Supposing that the poison be of more insidious form, a germ or a ptomaine, for instance, which slips past these outer "firing-out" defenses of the food-tube and arouses no suspicion of its presence until it has been partially digested and absorbed into the blood. Again, resourceful nature is ready with another line of defense.
Hence, at a very early period we find the development of the rudiments of systems of body-sewerage, providing for the escape of waste poisons through the food-tube, through the kidneys, through the gills and lungs, through the sweat glands of the skin.
In fine, follow nature's hints whenever she gives them: treat pain by rest, infections by fresh air and cleanliness, the digestive disturbances by avoiding their cause and helping the food-tube to flush itself clean; keep the skin clean, the muscles hard, and the stomach well filled and you will avoid nine-tenths of the evils which threaten the race.
Easily first among these trouble-breeding remnants is that famous, or rather notorious, scrap of intestine, the appendix vermiformis, an obvious survival from that peaceful, ancestral period when we were more largely herbivorous in our diet and required a longer and more complicated food-tube, with larger side pouches in the course of it, to dissolve and absorb our food.
We knew in some crude way that it "made blood," that it prepared the food-products for use by the body-cells, and that it secreted the bile; but this latter secretion had little real digestive value, and the other changes seemed hardly important enough to demand that every drop of the blood coming from the food-tube should pass through this custom-house.
"Despise not the day of small things" is good pathology as well as Scripture. Here we have a little, worm-shaped tag, or side branch, of the food-tube, barely three or four inches long, of about the diameter of a small quill and of a calibre that will barely admit an ordinary knitting needle. And yet we speak of it with bated breath.
A small, twisted, shriveling spur or side twig of the intestine, opening from a point which has become a kind of settling basin in the food-tube, its mouth gaping, as it were, to admit any poisonous or irritating food, infectious materials, disease-germs, the ordinary bacteria which swarm in the alimentary canal, or irritating foreign bodies, like particles of dirt, sand, hairs, fragments of bone, pins, etc., which may have been accidentally swallowed.
When once the food has been dissolved in the food-tube and absorbed by the cells of its walls, the next problem is how it shall be sent all over the body to supply the different parts that are hungry for it; for we must remember that the real eating of the food is done by the billions upon billions of tiny living cells of which the body is made up. The Pipe Lines of the Body.
The connection between arteries and veins is shown only in the brain. In passing through the liver, the blood is purified of some irritating substances picked up from the food-tube, and the melted food which it contains is further prepared for the use of the cells of the body.
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