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Updated: May 8, 2025
The substances in solution will, under these conditions, pass from the dense to the weaker solution. The process is a purely physical one. To illustrate osmosis. In the vessel A is a solution of sugar; in B, is pure water. In the bladder A is a sugar solution. In the vessel B is pure water. This process of osmosis lies at the basis of the absorption of food from the alimentary canal.
I prevent the loss of anything in the blood which I want retained by placing in the salt solution around the tubes an amount of that substance equal to that held in solution by the blood. Of course that does not apply to the colloidal substances in the blood which would not pass by osmosis under any circumstances.
This last idea is already an old one: Jager, More, and Professor Traube have all endeavoured to show that the direction and speed of osmosis are determined by differences in the surface-tensions; and recent experiments, especially those of Batelli, seem to prove that osmosis establishes itself in the way which best equalizes the surface-tensions of the liquids on both sides of the partition.
When we think of life, as the materialists do, as of mechanico-chemical origin, or explicable in terms of the natural universal order, we think of the play of material forces amid which we live, we think of their subtle action and interaction all about us of osmosis, capillarity, radio-activity, electricity, thermism, and the like; we think of the four states of matter, solid, fluid, gaseous, and ethereal, of how little our senses take in of their total activities, and we do not feel the need of invoking a transcendental principle to account for it.
Under these conditions, which will always occur after food has been digested by the digestive juices, the food will begin to pass through this membranous wall of the intestine into the blood under the influence of the physical force of osmosis. Thus the primary factor in food absorption is a physical one.
The absorption of the chyle through the walls of the intestine seemed to be a mechanically intelligible process of osmosis and diffusion. But in reality it proves to be rather a process of selection on the part of the epithelial cells of the intestine, analogous to the selection and rejection exercised elsewhere by unicellular organisms.
The interchange of gases at the lungs, however, is not fully understood, and it is possible that other forces than osmosis play a part. *Capacity of the Lungs.*—The air which passes into and from the lungs in ordinary breathing, called the tidal air, is but a small part of the whole amount of air which the lungs contain.
In following the processes of digestion, all goes well with his chemistry and his mechanics till he comes to the absorption of food-particles, or their passage through the walls of the intestines into the blood. Here, the ordinary physical forces fail him, and living matter comes to his aid. The inner wall of the intestine is not a lifeless membrane, and osmosis will not solve the mystery.
None of the fats passed through by osmosis. After eight hours more, the iodine reaction was quite decisive in all cases, but no fat had passed through even now. On titrating 20 grammes of the contents of each beaker, I. If we throw a stone into the water, a wave will be produced that will extend in a circle.
If I attribute the phenomenon of life to a vital force or principle, am I any more unscientific than I am when I give a local habitation and a name to any other causal force, as gravity, chemical affinity, cohesion, osmosis, electricity, and so forth? These terms stand for certain special activities in nature and are as much the inventions of our own minds as are any of the rest of our ideas.
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