Page:Defensive Ferments of the Animal Organism (3rd edition).djvu/155

specifically directed against particular substrates, makes it possible for us to demonstrate their existence, and the knowledge, that ferments play an important part amongst the means of defence of the animal organism against disharmonious substances, indicates this much progress, that we are enabled thereby to follow up, experimentally, phenomena which we meet with under normal conditions in the individual cells of the body. With the help of the ferments the cell is continuously remodelling in a suitable manner the food, which the blood brings to it still in harmony with the plasma, either by way of completing a further decomposition, or of setting up a synthesis. The ferments are the tools of the cells, by means of which fuel is brought into a suitable form, the structure of the cell is completed, and various substances are prepared, which, as secretions, have a more or less definite part to play throughout the organism. If the organism liberates defensive ferments, then its cells effect nothing actually new. A normal process is simply allocated to a specific case. The ferments are adapted to the new kind of substrate, and, if necessary, passed out into the circulation. So that this form of defence against disharmonious substances, which the cell utilizes, may be ranked directly with the normal processes of cellular metabolism an—idea which has always dominated the researches of Paul