LIFTING 120 TONS WITH It OUNCES OF MUSCLE.

Rodney and Otamatea Times, Waitemata and Kaipara Gazette, 1 October 1913, Page 3

LIFTING 120 TONS WITH It OUNCES OF MUSCLE.

Hre average adult heart is a little bundle of muscles that seldom weigh more than eleven ounces, yet every day these eleven ounces of muscles, lift one hundred and twenty tons to a height.of one foot. That is, the power exerted by the normal heart every 24 hours is sufficient to lift that weight.

Physiology has never revealed a structural wonder so great or so striking as that of the heart. Six ounces of blood are sent forth into the veins or conduits of the human system each, time your heart beats. At the start the arithmetic of this is easy, but as one goes along through the years the figures become so large that it ia difficult to grasp the magnitude of theN work of the^heart..

As the heart does, or should, beat seventy times each - minute and the amount of blood it forces out with every beat or stroke is) six ounces/ the heart beats 4200 times each 'hour; To carry the work of the heart further, it means this little eleven ourice bundle of muscle, beats 100,800 times every 24 hours, or thirty million times a year. If a N man lived to be seventy years old, then, his -heart, would have beat 2,500,000,000 times! >

Forcing six ounces of blood into the arteries and through the system 70 times a taiinute, and reckoning 32 ounces to the quart on the old standard: "a pint a pound, the "world around/ this; would take three and one-eighth- gallons of blood forced out every minute, or 187^ heart forces that amount out every hour. Of course, everyone1 knows that it is the same blood' renewed, but over and over again. ' .

This shows again that the heart forces out 4500 gallons of blood every day and 1,642,500 gallons every year. In seventy years the heart would have forced 114,975,000 gallons of blood through your entire body by way of arteries—enough to fill a small sized

lake or pond