by the materials in the digestive tube, the blood, the liver, or other organs.
This building up of reserve stuff, the complement and counterpart of functional destruction, is not chemical synthesis. It is, on the contrary, generally, and on the whole, a simplification of the food that has been introduced. This is true, at least as far as the muscle is concerned. However, to this operation, Claude Bernard has given the name of organizing synthesis, but the phrase is not a happy one. But in no case was the eminent physiologist deceived as to the character of the operation. "The organizing synthesis," says he, "remains internal, silent, hidden in its phenomenal expression, gathering together noiselessly the materials which will be expended."
These considerations enable us to understand the existence of the two great categories into which the eminent physiologist divides the phenomena of animal life: the phenomena of the destruction of reserve-stuff corresponding to functional facts—that is to say expenditures of energy; and the plastic phenomena of the building-up of reserves of organic regeneration, corresponding to functional repose—i.e., to the supply of food to the tissues.
Distinction between Active Protoplasm and Reserve-stuff.—If it is not exactly in these terms that Claude Bernard formulated this fruitful idea, it is at any rate in this way that it is to be interpreted. This can be done by giving it a little more precision. We apply more rigorously than that great physiologist the distinction drawn by himself between really active and living protoplasm and the reserve-stuff which it prepares. To the latter is restricted the
