not repeat the course of the energetic flux in the animal organism. The heat is not transformed into anything. It is simply dissipated.
The Part played by Animal Heat as a Condition of Physiological Manifestations.—Does this mean that heat is useless to life in the very beings in which it is most abundantly produced—i.e., in man and in the warm-blooded vertebrates? So far from this being so, it is necessary to life. But its utility has a peculiar character which must neither be misunderstood nor exaggerated. It is not transformed into chemical or vital reactions, but merely creates for them a favourable condition.
According to the first principle of energetics, for the vital fact to be derived from the thermal fact, the heat must be preliminarily transformed into chemical energy, since chemical energy is necessarily an antecedent and generating form of vital energy. Now this regressive transformation is impossible according to the current theories of general physics. The part played by heat in the act of chemical combination is that of a primer to the reaction. It consists in placing the reacting bodies, by changing their state or by modifying their temperature, in the condition in which they ought to be for the chemical forces to come into play. For example, in the combination of hydrogen and oxygen by setting light to an explosive mixture, heat only acts as a primer to the phenomenon, because the two gases which are passive at ordinary temperatures, require to be raised to 400° C. before chemical affinity comes into play. And so it is with the reactions which go on in the organism. They have a maximum temperature, and the part played by animal heat is to furnish them with it.
