Darwiniana : Essays — Volume 02Huxley, Thomas Henry
Science
Darwiniana : Essays — Volume 02
Huxley, Thomas Henry
Darwin, Charles, 1809-1882; Evolution (Biology)
whole body in the gross to that sort of simple expression given in Fig. 1,
so we may reduce the whole of the microscopic structural elements to a form
of even greater simplicity; just as the plan of the whole body may be so
represented in a sense (Fig. 1), so the primary structure of every tissue
may be represented by a mass of cells (Fig. 2).
[Illustration: Fig. 2.]
Having thus, in this sort of general way, sketched to you what I may call,
perhaps, the architecture of the body of the horse (what we term
technically its Morphology), I must now turn to another aspect. A horse is
not a mere dead structure: it is an active, living, working machine.
Hitherto we have, as it were, been looking at a steam-engine with the fires
out, and nothing in the boiler; but the body of the living animal is a
beautifully-formed active machine, and every part has its different work to
do in the working of that machine, which is what we call its life. The
horse, if you see him after his day's work is done, is cropping the grass
in the fields, as it may be, or munching the oats in his stable. What is he
doing? His jaws are working as a mill--and a very complex mill
too--grinding the corn, or crushing the grass to a pulp. As soon as that
operation has taken place, the food is passed down to the stomach, and
there it is mixed with the chemical fluid called the gastric juice, a
substance which has the peculiar property of making soluble and dissolving
out the nutritious matter in the grass, and leaving behind those parts
which are not nutritious; so that you have, first, the mill, then a sort of
chemical digester; and then the food, thus partially dissolved, is carried
back by the muscular contractions of the intestines into the hinder parts
of the body, while the soluble portions are taken up into the blood. The
blood is contained in a vast system of pipes, spreading through the whole
body, connected with a force-pump,--the heart,--which, by its position and
by the contractions of its valves, keeps the blood constantly circulating
in one direction, never allowing it to rest; and then, by means of this
circulation of the blood, laden as it is with the products of digestion,
the skin, the flesh, the hair, and every other part of the body, draws from
it that which it wants, and every one of these organs derives those
materials which are necessary to enable it to do its work.
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