BLOOD AND SALT.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue LXVIII, 13 July 1912, Page 10

BLOOD AND SALT.

As Mephistopheles correctly observes when asking Faust to sign an ny cement with him in the usual satanic fashion, "Blood is a quite peculiar juice." Our blood and that of ;i'l ether animals is salt. It is in a sense the daughter of the salt sea, and owes the presence in it of a large quantity of chloride of sodium, or common fait fend of other salts), to the fact that all animals, whether now living on land cr in water, have sprung from remote ancestors which lived m. the salt sea, Their bodies, bheir food, and thei: digestive canals were, in or-.nor apes, bathed with salt water, and the wlole chemistdy of their tissues Jbecame related to the presence in them fa large proportion of dissolved salt So that now that many of them have left the sea and become land-dweilin.o- ?nimals or inhabitants of "fresh" waters thy still have to keep up the presence ot salt in the blood, which they do by eating substances containing" thatchemical body, or even by taking the pure crystahne chloride of sodium vhen they can get it, says Sir Ray Lankester.