But, however important the vascular system may be to the more advanced and larger and highly-differentiated animals, it is not at all so indispensable an element of animal life as is commonly supposed. The older science of medicine regarded the blood as the real source of life. Even in the still prevalent confused notions of heredity the blood plays the chief part. People speak generally of full blood, half blood, etc., and imagine that the hereditary transmission of certain characters "lies in the blood." The incorrectness of these ideas is clearly seen from the fact that in the act of generation the blood of the parents is not directly transmitted to the offspring, nor does the embryo possess blood in its early stages. We have already seen that not only the differentiation of the four secondary germinal layers, but also the first structures of the principal organs in the embryo of all the Vertebrates, take place long before there is any trace of the vascular system--the heart and the blood. In accordance with this ontogenetic fact, we must regard the vascular system as one of the latest organs from the phylogenetic point of view; just as we have found the alimentary canal to be one of the earliest. In any case, the vascular system is much later than the alimentary. (FIGURE 2.358. Red blood-cells of various Vertebrates (equally magnified). 1. of man, 2. camel, 3. dove, 4. proteus, 5. water-salamander (Triton), 6. frog, 7. merlin (Cobitis), 8. lamprey (Petromyzon). a surface-view, b edge-view. (From Wagner.) FIGURE 2.359. Vascular tissues or endothelium (vasalium). A capillary from the mesentery. a vascular cells, b their nuclei.) The important nutritive fluid that circulates as blood and lymph in the elaborate canals of our vascular system is not a clear, simple fluid, but a very complex chemical juice with millions of cells floating in it. These blood-cells are just as important in the complicated life of the higher animal body as the circulation of money is to the commerce of a civilised community. Just as the citizens meet their needs most conveniently by means of a financial circulation, so the various tissue-cells, the microscopic citizens of the multicellular human body, have their food conveyed to them best by the circulating cells in the blood. These blood cells (haemocytes) are of two kinds in man and all the other Craniotes--red cells (rhodocytes or erythrocytes) and colourless or lymph cells (leucocytes). The red colour of the blood is caused by the great accumulation of the former, the others circulate among them in much smaller quantity. When the colourless cells increase at the expense of the red we get anaemia (or chlorosis).