Lifting 120 Tons with II Ounces of Muscle.

Kaipara and Waitemata Echo, 10 July 1914, Page 2

Lifting 120 Tons with II Ounces of Muscle.

The average adult heart is a little bundle muscles that seldom weighs more than/ eleven ounces, yet every day these eleven ounces of muscles lift one hundred and twenty tons to a height of one foot. That is, the power exerted by the normal heart every twenty-four hours is sufficient to lift that weight. Physiology has never revealed a structural wonder so great or so striking as that of the heart. Six ounces of blood are sent forth into the veins or conduits of the human system each time your heart beats. At the start the arithmetic of this is easy, but as one goes along through the years the figures become so large that it is di/licult to .grasp the magnitude of the work 'of the heart. As the., heart, does or shquld, beat seventy times each minute and the amount of blood it forces out with overy beat or stroke is six ounces, the heart beats 4,200 times each hour. To carry the work of the heart further, it means this little eleven ounce bundle of muscles beats 100.800 times every twentyfour hours, or thirty million times a year. If a man lived to be seventy years old, then, his heart would have beat 2,500,000,000 times ! Forcing six; ounces of blood into the arteries and through the system seventy times a minute, and reckoning Ihirty-two ounces to the quart on the old standard :"a pint's a pound, the world around," this would make three and one-eighth gallons of blood forced out every minute, or 187 k heart forces that amount out every hour. Of course everyone knows that it is the same blood renewed, but used over and over again. This shows again 'that the heart forces out 4,500 gallons of blood every day and 1,642.500 gallons every year. In seventy years the heart would have forced 114,975,000 gallons of blood through your entire body by way of arteriesenough to fill a small-sized lake or pond.