NEUOFFENBARUNGThe structure of the spleen and the preparation of blood (15 January 1847)
1. If you were to observe a small piece of an animal spleen through a good microscope, you would discover a number of small chambers, which are mostly quadrangular or cubic in content, but sometimes also form triangular pyramids; more rarely, these chambers are ovoid and round. These chambers are organically connected at the corners by small cylinders, but the walls of these chambers are free; therefore, a spleen is also very soft and loose to the touch. Between the rows of the chambers, which are bound together, there are a lot of blood vessels, which do not consist of uniform tubes, but only of such tubes, which are sometimes narrow, sometimes wide, and which present themselves to the eye in approximately the same way as the thread of a cross spider, when it has covered itself with it's gray-white sticky beads; You will have already seen how this animal decorates it's elastic thread with small adhesive beads, which serve to glue an insect to the glue spindle like a bird, the moment it touches the thread and can never leave it.
2. This is the shape of a blood vessel in the spleen; it will be even more comprehensible to you if I compare it to a very fine string of the smallest number beads. Such blood vessels exist throughout the entire length of the spleen, as well as through the transverse parts of it in an exceedingly large quantity. These blood vessels begin in a single vessel that is connected with the stomach and end again with a main vessel that is connected with the heart on the right side; At the same time, this entire splenic tissue is enclosed by a delicate skin, through which the splenic combs and pearl cord-like blood vessels look like dark red warts. Since this spleen is an extremely tender tissue in animals, it is surrounded with an extra fat-net, so that it is firstly more secure, and secondly, because of it's constant rubbing activity, it's enveloping good fatty material protects it against hurting itself as a result of such activity.
3. Now we have before us, as well as it is possible in brevity, a certain kind of anatomical description of the spleen, which, in the dead state of course assumes a form very different from that now described; but now we must also know what business it actually performs here with this very arrangement, and how this very arrangement is useful for this activity.
4. We have already heard that the spleen, with it's blood vessels, is connected with the stomach and the heart; why is that? Because it absorbs the juices from the stomach that pass into the blood, thus actually transforming them into blood and delivering that to the heart; therefore it can very easily happen in full-blooded people, that the spleen becomes too overfilled with blood and because it cannot discharge all that is produced in it to the heart, the blood which has accumulated in the spleen, recedes into the stomach, and the person then suffers vomiting of blood. And if the blood does not find it's way out, it can very easily lead to inflammation, and in time, which is even worse, to hardening of this main viscera; hence the frequent occurring vomiting of blood usually comes only from the spleen, and very rarely from the lungs.
5. In this way we have already witnessed working of the lungs; the only question now is, how does the spleen produce the blood? This, too, we will examine very briefly.
6. When the egg-white looking juice passes from the stomach into the spleen, it remains in these pearl- like blood veins for certain periods, and only moves one pearl further with each pulse beat. At the same time, however, with each pulse-beat, friction occurs in the spleen's chambers. Through this friction, these chambers are filled with electric fire, which is positive toward the stomach area and negative toward the heart area; therefore, the chambers are more sharp-edged toward the stomach area, while they become more egg-shaped toward the heart area.
7. This electric fire naturally causes the chambers to expand very much and to contract very much; and since these chambers are connected to each other at the edges as well as to each of the blood vessels by small cylinders, the result is that the juices in the blood vessels become more and more fermented. Through this fermentation, the carbon, which is still somewhat too abundant in it, separates out and is then delivered through the chambers partly to the bile, but also partly to the fat; at the same time, this fermentation produces many small bubbles, which, when they come under the control of the negative electricity, shrink more and take on a lentil-like shape.
8. When they are half filled with this negative electricity, they assume a saffron-like yellowish color, and like this already enter the heart chamber as blood; The blood is not a continuous fluid, but a small lentil- like pulp, which, in it's small lentils – which are very smooth and slippery on the surface – brings and distributes the negative electricity throughout the body.
9. This electricity then also heats the whole organism; and where these lentils are then driven through very narrow vessels, they burst, after which bursting the shell becomes liquid and passes into the so- called lymphatic juices, while the electric substance released by this bursting is consumed as an iron- containing ether for the stimulation of the nerves.
10. Now we had a good overview of our spleen, it's composition and in it's work in the shortest possible time; and since we now have a quite clear basis in this way, we can now venture quite confidently and as well-prepared as possible beforehand, into an admittedly somewhat larger fire-chamber of our earth's spleen.
11. The construction of these is similar to the small construction of the above-described animal spleen, to which the human spleen can also be counted; however, each such chamber is several billion times larger than such an animal spleen chamber – indeed, in many such earthly spleen-chambers there would be room for several million human beings, from which ratio it can already be inferred in advance that the earth's spleen-construction must indeed be a very large one. The construction of the sun, however, like the construction of the suns in general, is very different from the construction of an earth-body, as already in general the construction of an earth-body has such great differences with the construction of another earth body that only the eye of the Creator can see the general similarity in it. Therefore you must not think, if you know the interior of the earth, that you would recognize the interior of the earth of Jupiter or of another planet; and therefore we want to go into such an earth-milk chamber and see how things happen there.
12. Look at the grayish-brown walls, how they are constantly flashing with innumerable flashes of lightning; millions of the greatest thunders is continuously heard, and behold, out of the chambers go wide channels; through them, a mighty flood rushes in; the continual electric flames dissolve the flood into strongly excited vapors; with force immeasurable to you, these vapors penetrate further through other channels with the most terrible roar; again, new floods rush into the chamber; again, there is boiling, roaring and whirring, such as has never been heard on the surface of the earth. Go out of the chamber and look at the blood vessels, which stretch between the rows of chambers in the same form as described above, and listen how the most powerful floods rush through them, how here and there these channels, where they are narrower, contract like great primeval giant snakes, and soon expand again, in order to further promote the powerful floods present in them. See how the same thing happens and must happen here on a large scale as in the animal spleen on a small scale.
13. That these juices, as in animals, pass from the stomach to the spleen, and from there to the heart, as the nourishing blood of the earth, hardly needs to be mentioned.
14. In this way, we have now become acquainted with this piece of viscera as precisely as it is possible in a short time, and thus we will go to another piece of the earth's viscera next.