It follows that heat intervenes in animal life in two capacities—first and foremost as excretum, or end of the vital phenomenon, of physiological work; and on the other hand, as a condition or primer of the chemical reactions of the organism; and generally, as a favourable condition for the appearance of the physiological manifestations of living matter. Thus, it is not dissipated in sheer waste.
I was led to adopt these views some years ago from certain experiments on the rôle played in food by alcohol. I did not then know that they had already been expressed by one of the masters of contemporary physiology, M. A. Chauveau, and that they were related in his mind to a series of conceptions and of researches of great interest, in the development of which I have since then taken a share.
Two Forms of Energy supplied to Animals by Food.—To say that food is simultaneously a supply of energy and a supply of matter, is really to express in a single sentence the fundamental conception of biology, in virtue of which life brings into play no substratum or characteristic dynamism. According to this, the living being appears to us as the seat of an incessant circulation of matter and energy, starting from the external world and returning to it. All food is nothing but this matter and this energy. All its characteristics, our views as to its rôle, its evolution, all the rules of alimentation are simple consequences of this principle, interpreted by the light of energetics.
And first of all, let us ask what forms of energy are afforded by food? It is easy to see that there are two—food is essentially a source of chemical energy; and secondarily and accessorily, it is a source of heat.
