CATABOLIC • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Catabolic

... had only been trying to cheer him up as any friend might reasonably do. After all, a tree and a man.... Nonsense! One had an anabolic metabolism, one a catabolic. ...

— The Venus Trap • Evelyn E. Smith

... This repressive function is probably not worked from special nervous centers, nor can we speak with confidence of collisions with "sums of arrest" in a sense analogous to that of Herbart, or of stimuli that normally cause catabolic molecular processes in the cell, being mysteriously diverted to produce increased instability or anabolic lability in the sense of Wundt's Mechanik der Nerven. The concept now suggested by many facts is that inhibition ...

— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall