The Institutes of Medicine

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: I. COMMON, OR ORGANIC FUNCTIONS. 251. Organs which perform similar functions are very variable in structure in different orders of animals. The liver, for example, " is represented in one case by simple caeca, or blind sacs: in another by tufts of caeca; in a third by bunches of cells; in a fourth by a spongy mass; in a fifth by branched ducts ending in feather-like terminal twigs;" and so on, up to the complication of the most perfect animals. Nevertheless, they all secrete a very analogous fluid. And so of other organs and functions. A due regard for the preceding facts must unavoidably reconcile every mind to what I have said as to microscopical explorations of the minuteness of structure ( 131, 304, 306, 409, e). 252. Though structure be very various, there is a great analogy in the vital functions and their immediate products, ?even between plants and animals. This is remarkably true of every individual part in the different races of animals, whatever its simplicity or complexity ( 251). Hence, it becomes more and more manifest that the properties of life have a greater agency in the formation of organic products than the structure itself ( 67-69). 1. Motion. 253. Motion is the immediate result of the action of mobility or contractility, and was necessarily explained in describing that property ( 205-215). It is the function by which all things acquire their movement in organic beings. 254. Motion may be remotely mechanical, as the movement of the blood, ingesta,