A Practical Physiology eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 498 pages of information about A Practical Physiology.

A Practical Physiology eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 498 pages of information about A Practical Physiology.

  Experiment 103. To illustrate the effect of muscular exercise in
  quickening the pulse
.  Run up and down stairs several times.  Count the
  pulse both before and after.  Note the effect upon the rate.

Experiment 104. To show the action of the elastic walls of the arteries. Take a long glass or metal tube of small caliber.  Fasten one end to the faucet of a water-pipe (one in a set bowl preferred) by a very short piece of rubber tube.  Turn the water on and off alternately and rapidly, to imitate the intermittent discharge of the ventricles.  The water will flow from the other end of the rubber pipe in jets, each jet ceasing the moment the water is shut off.

  The experiment will be more successful if the rubber bulb attached to an
  ordinary medicine-dropper be removed, and the tapering glass tube be
  slipped on to the outer end of the rubber tube attached to the faucet.

Experiment 105.  Substitute a piece of rubber tube for the glass tube, and repeat the preceding experiment.  Now it will be found that a continuous stream flows from the tube.  The pressure of water stretches the elastic tube, and when the stream is turned off, the rubber recoils on the water, and the intermittent flow is changed into a continuous stream.
Experiment 106. To illustrate some of the phenomena of circulation. Take a common rubber bulb syringe, of the Davidson, Household, or any other standard make.  Attach a piece of rubber tube about six or eight feet long to the delivery end of the syringe.
To represent the resistance made by the capillaries to the flow of blood, slip the large end of a common glass medicine-dropper into the outer end of the rubber tube.  This dropper has one end tapered to a fine point.
Place the syringe flat, without kinks or bends, on a desk or table.  Press the bulb slowly and regularly.  The water is thus pumped into the tube in an intermittent manner, and yet it is forced out of the tapering end of the glass tube in a steady flow.
Experiment 107.  Take off the tapering glass tube, or, in the place of one long piece of rubber tube, substitute several pieces of glass tubing connected together by short pieces of rubber tubes.  The obstacle to the flow has thus been greatly lessened, and the water flows out in intermittent jets to correspond to the compression of the bulb.

Chapter VIII.

Respiration.

202.  Nature and Object of Respiration.  The blood, as we have learned, not only provides material for the growth and activity of all the tissues of the body, but also serves as a means of removing from them the products of their activity.  These are waste products, which if allowed to remain, would impair the health of the tissues.  Thus the blood becomes impoverished both by the addition of waste material, and from the loss of its nutritive matter.

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A Practical Physiology from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.