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Thoughts on Health and Some of Its Conditions
Thoughts on Health and Some of Its Conditions Author:James Hinton Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. FOOD—WHAT IT DOES. It is hard to know whether more to admire the variety of the forms under which food is supplied to the animal creation, or th... more »e simplicity of the fundamental plan. The number of nutritious substances baffles calculation, and embraces the utmost diversity of kinds, adapted to every variety of climate, circumstance, or habit. While the living organism, on the one hand, can build up a solid frame from liquid materials, on the other, it can pour iron through its veins, and reduce the hardest textures into blood. There is a squirrel in Africa that feeds on elephants' tusks ; and the mark of its teeth is a welcome sight to the ivory-collector. The cunning creature selects —for there is scope for epicurism even in this hard fare—the tusks which are richest in animal matter, and which are therefore the most valuable. But under whatever diversity of form it may be presented, food is in its essential nature always the same. To give us active bodies, it must be an active substance ; that is, it must consist of elements which tend to change through the operation of their chemical affinities. To furnish food for animal life is in one aspect a simple problem, though wrought out in infinite complexity. It is to provide matter in unstable equilibrium, as it is said, or constantly tending to assume new forms, like waves raised in water by the wind. Yet it must not be utterly incapable of retaining its existing form, but should be delicately balanced, as it were, so that it will admit of being transferred and moulded in various ways unaltered, and yet will undergo change immediately, when certain conditions are fulfilled. Given a substance thus composed, and there is food. For we must not limit our ideas here to that which happens to be food for us, or for the ...« less