Blood
Blood names 5 different subjects across the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf. Each is set out below.
Blood the red liquid of the body
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
the red liquid of the body. From one-tenth to one-thirteenth of a healthy person's body consists of blood. The blood of a horse equals one-eighteenth of the body-weight; that of an ox is about one twenty-third. Blood is about eight-tenths water. This water keeps the organs of the body moist and flexible, but its chief office is to carry nutrients to the tissues and waste away from them. Although not the first to understand the circulation of the blood, Dr. Harvey of London was the first to announce distinctly that the blood is forced by the contraction of the heart through tubes or arteries to all parts, including the utmost extremities of the body, and that it is collected again by tiny drainage tubes which unite into larger and larger veins until they pour the blood back into the heart again. To complete its circuit, the blood is forced by a similar system of outgoing arteries and incoming veins through the lungs. It is then ready for another trip through the body. A round trip occupies from fifteen to thirty seconds. The blood of a horse circulates in thirty-one seconds. As stated, the water of the blood is a carrier. The lungs and the digestive system pour gases, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, sugars, salts and fats, lime, iron, and all kinds of food into the blood, which whirls the molecules along in its current and deposits them where they are needed to build up bone, muscle, sinew, and fat. Material no longer needed by the body is dumped into the veins and drained away, to be taken care of and expelled through the lungs, the kidneys, the skin, or the alimentary canal . Of course, the blood carries whatever is poured into it. If one's food is unwholesome, the blood carries poor building material. If the water one drinks, the air one breathes, or the food one eats contains germs, the microbes of disease, the blood carries them promptly to the tissues. Malaria, for instance, is nothing more or less than the presence of countless numbers of microscopic animals introduced into one's blood in the first instance by the bill of a certain mosquito. Although the blood cannot refuse to carry germs of disease, nature has made a wonderful provision to render them harmless. The blood is full, literally swarming, with white, spherical corpuscles or cells that feed on bacteria. If one is in health and well nourished the chances are that these white cells will take care of all harmful animals and bacteria. In famine-stricken districts where the people have thin blood, lacking in vigorous white cells, contagious disease is most likely to get a footing and become an epidemic. The color of the blood is due to still more numerous red cells or corpuscles, in the proportion of ninety-nine red cells to one white cell. They are so numerous as to be beyond comprehension--5,000,000 to a cubic millimeter. They are flat disks pressed inward on each face. They run through the fine capillaries, face to face, like a roll of coin. In most animals the red cells are circular, but in the camel and in reptiles they are oval. The red cells of the various animals differ greatly in size. Those of a frog are very large. Those of a sheep are small. Human corpuscles may be identified, therefore, under a microscope. More than one bloodstained knife and many a blood-stained garment has been examined to ascertain whether the telltale spots were caused by human blood. It is literally true that blood cries out against a murderer. Millions of red corpuscles break down in the body during every second of time . New ones are supplied by the red marrow of the bones, where they are produced and sent into the circulation. The number of red corpuscles varies with conditions. They increase in high latitudes . They often decrease during disease of the body, producing a condition called anaemia. The red corpuscles are the carriers of oxygen. Arterial blood, or blood going outward, has a bright red color, due to oxygen freshly obtained from the lungs. Venous blood, or blood returning through the veins, is dark, not only lacking oxygen, but laden with waste matter. The blood of animals is warm or cold according to the amount of oxygen it carries. Cold-blooded animals do not require to breathe so freely as the warm-blooded animals. The proper temperature of the human body is about 98 degree F. The circulation of the blood equalizes the temperature of the body. Cold-blooded animals have the temperature of their surroundings. The blood does not supply enough oxygen to keep them warm. Warm-blooded animals are supplied with oxygen from the blood. Their bodies possess a temperature in a degree, at least, independent of their surroundings. The power of the blood to keep up the temperature of the body is indispensable to animal life in cold countries. The Eskimo, and, in fact, all people living in wintry climes would be frozen solid, were it not that the blood carries oxygen to all parts of the body and keeps the temperature very nearly constant at 98 degree. Blood possesses a peculiar quality of clotting on exposure to air. Blood is composed of clear liquid and of blood cells or corpuscles. The liquid is called plasma. If plasma is exposed to the air, threads known as fibrin are formed. These fibrin threads entangle and inclose the corpuscles, forming what is known as a clot. This quality of clotting or coagulating closes wounds, if not too serious, and prevents bleeding. Physiologists are satisfied that clotting is not due to the fact that blood has ceased to be in motion, nor is it due to exposure to the air. They do not know why blood clots, neither do they know why it does not clot while it is within a healthy blood vessel. See Malaria
Blood the red circulating fluid in the bodies of man and the higher animals
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
the red circulating fluid in the bodies of man and the higher animals. It is formed from chyle and lymph when these substances are subjected to the action of oxygen taken into the lungs by the process of inspiration. It is the general material from which all the secretions are derived, besides which it carries away from the frame whatever is noxious or superfluous. In man its temperature rarely varies from 36.6° C. =98° F., but in birds it sometimes reaches 42.8° C. 109° F. The blood in reptiles, amphibia, and fishes, and the circulating fluid in the invertebrata, is cold, that is, in no case more than a little above the temperature of the surrounding medium. The vessels which conduct the blood out of the heart are called arteries, and those which bring it back again veins. The blood in the left side of the heart and in the arteries, called arterial blood, is bright red; that in the right side of the heart and in the veins, called venous blood, is blackish purple. Viewed by spectrum analysis, the hæmoglobin of arterial blood differs from that of venous blood, the former being combined with oxygen and the latter being deoxidized. Blood has a saline and disagreeable taste, and, when fresh, a peculiar smell. It has an alkaline reaction. It is not, as it appears, homogeneous, but under a powerful microscope is seen to be a colorless fluid with little, round red bodies called blood disks or blood corpuscles, and a few larger ones called white corpuscles floating about in it. When removed from the body and allowed to stagnate it separates into a thicker portion called cruor, crassamentum or clot, and a thinner one denominated serum. See BLEED- ING, BLOOD LETTING, etc. In law, whole blood is descent not simply from the same ancestor, but from the same pair of ancestors, while half The blood is descent only from the one. corruption of blood is the judicial stripping it of the right to carry with it up or down the advantage of inheritance; its purification or restitution is the restoration to it of the privilege of inheritance.
Blood THOMAS (commonly called Colonel Blood)
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
THOMAS (commonly called Colonel Blood), born in Ireland about 1618, was a disbanded officer of Oliver Cromwell, and lost some estates in Ireland at the Restoration. His whole life was one of plotting and adventure, though it is probable that he acted a double part, keeping the Government informed of so much as might secure his own safety. His most daring exploit was an attempt to steal the crown jewels (May 9, 1671) from the Tower. He was seized with the crown in his possession, but was not only pardoned by Charles, but obtained forfeited Irish estates of £500 annual value. He died in London, in 1680. BLOODBIRD (myzoměla sanguinolenta), an Australian species of honey-
Blood COUNCIL OF, the name popularly applied to the Council of Troubles
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
COUNCIL OF, the name popularly applied to the Council of Troubles, established by the Duke of Alva, in the Netherlands, in 1567. In the first three months alone its victims numbered 1,800, and soon there was hardly a Protestant house in the Netherlands that had not furnished a victim.
Blood COUNCIL OF sucker
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
COUNCIL OF sucker, so called from the rich scarlet color of the head, breast and back of the male.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's 1910 figures still hold — blood is roughly four-fifths water, with about five million red cells per cubic millimetre — but the entry ends by admitting that physiologists "do not know why blood clots." That answer arrived piecemeal: clotting is now understood as a cascade of plasma factors triggered by tissue damage and platelets (a cell type the 1910 account never names), converting fibrinogen to the fibrin threads it describes. More consequential still, Karl Landsteiner had identified the ABO blood groups in 1901, work the entry does not mention; with the Rh factor (1940) and citrate anticoagulant, safe transfusion and stored blood banks became routine, something impossible when this was written. The forensic boast that human blood can be told from animal blood under a microscope has been overtaken entirely by DNA profiling, developed from 1984, which can name the individual rather than merely the species.
Written for this edition, 2026.