economy exist:—the digestive apparatus which prepares the food and enables it to pass into the blood, into the lymph, and finally into the liquid medium which bathes each cell and constitutes its real medium; the respiratory apparatus which imports the oxygen and exports the gaseous excrement, carbonic acid; the heart and the circulatory system which distributes through the system the internal medium, suitably purified and recuperated. The organization is dominated by the necessities of cellular life. This is the law of the city, to which Claude Bernard has given the name of the law of the constitution of organisms.
Death by Lesion of the Major Organs. Vital Tripod.—Thus we understand what life is, and at the same time what is the death of a complex living being. The city perishes if its more or less complicated mechanisms which look after its revictualling and its discharge are seriously affected at any point. The different groups may survive for a more or less lengthy period, but progressively deprived of the means of food or of discharge, they are finally involved in the general ruin. If the heart stops, there is a universal famine; if the lungs are seriously injured, we are asphyxiated; if the principal organ of discharge, the kidney, ceases to perform its allotted task, there is a general poisoning by the used-up and toxic materials retained in the blood.
We understand how the integrity of the major organs,—the heart, the lungs, the kidney,—is indispensable to the maintenance of existence. We understand that their lesion, by a series of successive repercussions, involves universal death. We always die, said the doctors of old, because of the failure of
