- vention of the notion of energy enables us more
completely to understand the true nature of food. We must, in fact, have recourse to the energetic conception if we desire to take into account all that the organism requires from food. It not only requires matter, but also, and most important of all, energy.
Investigators so far concentrated their thoughts exclusively on the necessity of a supply of matter—that is to say, they only looked upon one side of the problem. The living body presents, at each of its points, an uninterrupted series of disintegrations and reconstitutions, the materials being supplied from without by alimentation, and rejected by excretion. Cuvier gave to this unceasing circulation of ambient matter throughout the vital world the name of vital vortex, and he rightly saw in it the characteristic of nutrition, and the distinctive feature of life.
This idea of the cycle of matter has been completed in our own time by that of the cycle of energy. All the phenomena of the universe, and therefore those of life, are conceived of as energetic transformations. We now look at them in their relationship instead of considering them individually as of old. Each has an antecedent and a consequent unity with which it is connected in magnitude by the law of equivalents taught us by contemporary physics. And thus we may conceive of their succession as the cycle of a kind of indestructible agent, which changes only apparently, or assumes another form as it passes from one to the other, but its magnitude remains unaltered. This is energy. Thus, in the living being there is not only a circulation of matter, but also a circulation of energy.
The most general result of research in physiological
