The Nature and Origin of Living Matter (Classic Reprint) - Tapa dura

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Excerpt from The Nature and Origin of Living Matter

After discussing the many investigations which have been made on this subject Gavarret summarised their results as follows -all these experiments agree in showing that in the muscular system of an animal which accomplishes actual work (such as raising a weight, dragging a load, etc.) everything goes on as in an ordinary steam-engine. While the muscle performs work, the heat produced by the internal combustion becomes divided into two complementary portions; the one part appears as sensible heat, and determines the temperature of the muscle, the other disappears, so far as its existence in the form of heat is concerned, and, by the intervention of the muscular contraction, becomes transformed into mechanical work. The muscle is an animated machine, which, like the steam-engine, utilises the heat in order to produce work: in both cases there is necessarily an equivalence between the heat which disappears, or is consumed, and the external work achieved.

In consequence of its origin, the energy manifested during the contraction of the muscle is directly comparable with the energy due to the elasticity of vapour when this is the motor power at work, as in a steam-engine. Chemical Change - combustion, in fact - in each case, in muscle and in steam-engine alike, causes the liberation of heat and in each case part of this liberated force is capable of manifesting itself anew in the form of mechanical energy. It matters not whence the heat is derived - whether it comes from the decomposition of the recently assimilated food products, in the blood which circulates through the muscle, or whether it proceeds from the liberated energy or sun-force that may have been locked up for ages in the bowels of the earth, but which is now set free by a process of combustion in the engine fire -the result is the same, and in the muscle, as much as in the steam-engine, we have to do with a machine in which the trans ference of heat into mechanical energy is capable of being effected.

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