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Updated: June 5, 2025
Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen are all lifeless bodies. Of these, carbon and oxygen unite in certain proportions and under certain conditions, to give rise to carbonic acid; hydrogen and oxygen produce water; nitrogen and other elements give rise to nitrogenous salts. These new compounds, like the elementary bodies of which they are composed, are lifeless.
Both of these substances express the result of oxidations going on in the body. The urea and uric acids represent the final result of the breaking down in the body of nitrogenous substances, of which albumen is the type. Unusual constituents of the urine are albumen, sugar, and bile.
If the fermentation is of vegetables or fruit, the toxins are irritating, stimulating and enervating, but not so dangerous or destructive to organic life as putrefaction, which is a fermentation set up in nitrogenous matter protein-bearing foods, but particularly animal foods. Endogenous toxins are autogenerated. They are the waste products of metabolism. Dr. John.
A fluid containing carbonic acid, water, and nitrogenous salts, which offers such a Barmecide feast to the animal, is a table richly spread to multitudes of plants; and, with a due supply of only such materials, many a plant will not only maintain itself in vigour, but grow and multiply until it has increased a million-fold, or a million million-fold, the quantity of protoplasm which it originally possessed; in this way building up the matter of life, to an indefinite extent, from the common matter of the universe.
The tendrils of a plant know where the stake or cord is, and they reach out for it and twine themselves around it. Unwind them, and the next day they are found again twined around it. Move the stake or cord, and the tendril moves after it. The insect-eating plants are able to distinguish between nitrogenous and non-nitrogenous food, accepting the one and rejecting the other.
On the other hand, the molecules constituting nitrogenous bodies are relatively vast and are chemically inert; and such combinations as their simpler types enter into, cannot withstand disturbing forces. Now a like difference is seen if we contrast with one another the so-called elements.
Some twenty-eight per cent of the grain is husk, seventy-two being kernel; and this kernel forms a meal containing twelve parts of nitrogenous matter, sixty-three of carbo-hydrates, five and a half of fatty matter, three of saline, and fifteen of water.
We are now prepared to answer the second part of the question which was suggested, and to find that nitrous acids formed in the atmosphere by direct oxidation of nitrogenous matter may unite with the ammonia present to produce one kind of saltpetre; and when the rains or the dews carry this to the earth, the salts of lime, potash, and soda there found will decompose this ammoniacal saltpetre, and set the ammonia free, to act over again its part.
Not only is starch changed into sugar in the course of digestion, but it has been proved by M. Claude Bernard that the liver is a factory in which other constituents of food are transformed into sugar: the need for sugar being so imperative that it is even thus produced from nitrogenous substances when no others are given. Again, children are fond of vegetable acids.
Fortunately a crucial test occurred to me, that of placing a large number of leaves in various nitrogenous and non-nitrogenous fluids of equal density; and as soon as I found that the former alone excited energetic movements, it was obvious that here was a fine new field for investigation.
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