cell-atrophy, are symptoms of the giving way of the vital energies to
the invasion of the filth and bacterial poisons absorbed from the
intestinal canal.

On the inner surface of the alimentary canal, from the stomach to the
colon, there are, it is estimated, over 20,000,000 rootlets (called
glands, lacteals, follicles, villi), which take up intestinal juices as
roots of a plant take sap from the soil. These millions of rootlets
give a velvety appearance to the alimentary canal, like a nap or downy
surface. Intestinal rootlets of the small intestines, like vegetal
rootlets, demand a certain amount of normal fluid and solid substance,
free from noxious gas. It is the down or nap of fabrics, and not their
body, that shows damage first. So it is with the frail structure of
vegetal and animal life if not properly supplied with nourishment from
day to day. There is probably in the vegetal bodies a continuous
circulation of sap corresponding to the digestive circulating fluids of
the alimentary canal. This circulation from the alimentary canal to the
blood-vessels, and from the blood-vessels to the alimentary canal,
involves a wonderful mechanism, facilitating the flow of several
gallons daily from each to the other during the process of
metamorphosis of food into flesh. You can thus see how inevitable it is
that the functions of these millions of secreting and excreting
rootlets will be disturbed by the clogging of the system with filth and
bacterial poisons as a consequence of chronic constipation, biliousness
and general foulness of the alimentary canal. Through such disturbance
nutrition is diminished, cell-atrophy progresses, and emaciation
becomes more marked. The progressive destruction of these rootlets,
involving the pathological change indicated, will be manifest in one of
its results, either costiveness or diarrhea.

Often the power of properly digesting and absorbing the foodstuffs is
so greatly diminished that the alimentary canal is about as useless as
a soft rubber tube. Millions on millions of these glands, lacteals and
follicles in the stomach and small intestines, are destroyed like the
rootlets of a plant or tree in unwholesome soil. The active circulation
of the digestive fluids ceases, and the sufferer is said to be costive
or to have chronic diarrhea. Both symptoms are the outgrowth of many
years of intestinal foulness, and indicate the degree and character of
intestinal irritability and semi-starvation