Fibrin : its origin and development in the animal organism, and its relation to life, health, longevity, and disease / by John Goodman.

Date:
1878
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Fibrin : its origin and development in the animal organism, and its relation to life, health, longevity, and disease / by John Goodman. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

    62/148 (page 46)
    DE. BEALE ON MUSCLE. accumulates upon its surface and at its two extremities. Thus the fibre increases in thickness and in length. The position of the masses of hioplasvi varies very much in different kinds of striped muscle. As regards the pabulum or protoplasm that feeds the germ or ovum, and the nucleus of cells, he admits that in the higher animals and man the nutritious fluid is conveyed through tubes or vessels, through which solutions pass very quickly. A solution of substances adapted for the nutrition of the tissues is continually flowing, he declares, through the wall of the vessels towards the bioplasm of the several tissues. (See Bioplasm, p. 30.) Dr. Beale says that muscle is formed from bioplasm or pro- tein, and elsewhere (p. 212) he speaks of fibrin as identical with protein matter— fibrin or protein. He says (p. 212) that a little fluid is expressed from the substance of muscle during contraction, and taken up again during rest. This contractile fibre, perhaps, consists of a passive basic substance of a fibrous character, through which is diffused a soft material, prone to move in directions at right angles to one another. This sub- stance can be expressed from the muscular tissue, and coagulates spontaneously like the fibrin of the blood. Young muscles yield a larger proportion of this material than old ones. As regards vitality, the signs by which it is known are not dis- covered in the points of living matter spoken of by Dr. Beale, but always in what he denominates dead matter. It is in the skin, the muscular system, the flashing eye, the moving limb, the sensitiveness of some one or other of these so-called dead organs, in which we first perceive, say in a supposed drowned person, indications of the return of life. Whatever route physiologists may pursue, we always discover them, as regards the subject before us, ultimately arriving at the same common termination. Dr. Beale denominates the muscle corpuscle-bioplasm, or living matter. Each living particle, he declares, was derived from pre-existeut living matter. In the very substance of the living matter itself, he says, one or more spots make their appearance as new centres of living matter. Absorbing nutrient material they grow. New points of forming material niay arise within these last. By these, he declares, apparently similar masses of bioplasm, different tissues, organs, and membranes are formed. (See Bioplasm, by Dr. Beale, pages 8, 7, 21, 13, 22, 23.) Now, bio- plasm, like all other constructive material, receives its nutritive pabulum from the digestive canal. The food is formed into chyle, and ultimately into blood, in which is contained red and white corpuscles, albumen, and congulable chyle, and lymph in solution, the latter being, as we have elsewhere shown, the only