These membranes are the filters of the body.  “In their absence there could be no building of structure, no solidification of tissue, nor organic mechanism.  Passive themselves, they, nevertheless, separate all structures into their respective positions and adaptations.”

MEMBRANOUS DETERIORATIONS.

In order to make perfectly clear to the reader’s mind the action and use of these membranous expansions, and the way in which alcohol deteriorates them, and obstructs their work, we quote again from Dr. Richardson: 

“The animal receives from the vegetable world and from the earth the food and drink it requires for its sustenance and motion.  It receives colloidal food for its muscles:  combustible food for its motion; water for the solution of its various parts; salt for constructive and other physical purposes.  These have all to be arranged in the body; and they are arranged by means of the membranous envelopes.  Through these membranes nothing can pass that is not, for the time, in a state of aqueous solution, like water or soluble salts.  Water passes freely through them, salts pass freely through them, but the constructive matter of the active parts that is colloidal does not pass; it is retained in them until it is chemically decomposed into the soluble type of matter.  When we take for our food a portion of animal flesh, it is first resolved, in digestion, into a soluble fluid before it can be absorbed; in the blood it is resolved into the fluid colloidal condition; in the solids it is laid down within the membranes into new structure, and when it has played its part, it is digested again, if I may so say, into a crystalloidal soluble substance, ready to be carried away and replaced by addition of new matter, then it is dialysed or passed through, the membranes into the blood, and is disposed of in the excretions.

“See, then, what an all-important part these membranous structures play in the animal life.  Upon their integrity all the silent work of the building up of the body depends.  If these membranes are rendered too porous, and let out the colloidal fluids of the blood—­the albumen, for example—­the body so circumstanced, dies; dies as if it were slowly bled to death.  If, on the contrary, they become condensed or thickened, or loaded with foreign material, then they fail to allow the natural fluids to pass through them.  They fail to dialyse, and the result is, either an accumulation of the fluid in a closed cavity, or contraction of the substance inclosed within the membrane, or dryness of membrane in surfaces that ought to be freely lubricated and kept apart.  In old age we see the effects of modification of membrane naturally induced; we see the fixed joint, the shrunken and feeble muscle, the dimmed eye, the deaf ear, the enfeebled nervous function.