The History of a Mouthful of Bread by Jean Macé (great novels to read txt) 📕

our frame, should break the links which bound them to the condition of fowl and vegetable, and thus be free to engage in new relations; just as a man who wishes to be naturalized in a new country must first break the ties which hold him to the old one. Those articles of food we were speaking of lately, which are so stiff and ceremonious, and want so much coaxing before they change into chyme, which, moreover, we call indigestible because they tire the stomach so much more than the rest, are merely those whose component parts being held together by more solid ties than usual, continue obstinately in the same state as at first, and will not consent to that dissolution which is the first condition of their glorious transformation.

Moreover, the transformation which has been described to you now, you will henceforth meet with everywhere; wherever, that is to say, and as far as, you choose to pursue the study of nature. God works by one grand and simple rule so far as we can discover. He destroys to reconstruct, builds up what is to be, out of the ruins of what has been, creates life by death, if I may so express myself, and thus, what takes place in our stomachs on a small scale goes on on a large one in the universe.

Social communities, like everything else, are subject to this universal law, and it is not always an advantage to them when they refuse to be digested in the great stomach of the age!

While we are on this subject, and to show you how wonderfully this little history of eating, told in this familiar style, applies right and left, let us reflect on the causes which have produced a great and mighty nation in one country (as in France), while in another (as in. Germany), a far more numerous and even more intellectual population has failed to rise to anything like the same distinction. The explanation is not difficult. In the one case, the petty tribes among which the land was originally divided consented to mix, and dissolve, and be digested as it were together, in order to revive again for a more glorious career; while in the other, the aboriginal societies have adhered stiffly to their distinctive characters, and failing to submit to the regenerating process, cling together in indigested portions, rather than assimilate into one great whole.

However, we must return to the pylorus or we shall be getting into a difficulty! What I am now going to offer you though, is rather hard of digestion, but it will not do to provide sweet pastry only for your brain; it will be more wholesome for it to have something a little more solid to bite at from time to time.

The pylorus , then, as has been shown, makes way for all sorts of aliments when they have been converted into chyme; i.e. , when they have lost their original form and individuality. They are dead to their first life, therefore; now the question is, how are they to be revived into the new one?

Behind the pylorus extends a long conduit or tube-so long as to be sometimes seven times the length of the whole body, but doubled up backwards and forwards a number of times, so as to form a large bundle, which fills the whole cavity of the belly-or as we also call it, the
abdomen . This bundle or packet is known to everybody as the intestines , and it is divided into two portions: the small intestine -that is, the slenderer, finer portion which begins at the
pylorus , and forms all the doublings of the packet, and the large intestine , which is shorter and thicker also, as its name implies, and keeps to some extent separate, though it is in reality only a continuation of the other. This starts at the base of the abdomen , near the right side, goes up in a straight line to the height of the stomach, below which it passes, making a large bend in front of the small intestine; after which it descends on the left side to the lower part of the trunk, where it terminates.

You will perhaps inquire how the chyme continues to make its way through all these manifold twists of the intestines; but do not trouble yourself; it has only to let itself go. That vermicular movement which we noticed in the oesophagus and in the stomach is found here also. It reigns, so to speak, from one end of our internal eating-machine to the other; which eating-machine, by the way, we will now call by its proper scientific name- the intestinal canal ; and it is by that movement the food is carried forward from the first moment it leaves the mouth, and helped through all its journeyings, till it reaches the termination of the large intestine.

If your body were made of glass, so that you could look through it to watch the intestine at work, it would appear to you like an enormous worm coiled up into a bundle, heaving and moving with all its rings at once. You never suspected there was such a movement within you; yet it has been going on there continually ever since you were born, and will not cease till you die. Your internal machinery never goes to sleep, not even when you are sleeping yourself. It is a workshop in constant operation, providing night and day for your necessities; and in this respect the inner man sets a first-rate example to the outer one! You will recollect what I said to you the other day about the internal republic, and the provinces which are under your sole government. It would be very disgraceful for the kingdom to be doing nothing while the republic is working so hard; and a queen who understands her office will make it a point of honor to banish idleness from her household; in the houses of her neighbors this word is unknown.

The chyme once launched into this moving tube, is in no danger of remaining stationary there; the fear is, of its passing on too quickly, as you will soon see. But this danger has been provided against. Along the whole course of its journey, though chiefly at the commencement, it encounters at intervals certain elastic fleshy valves which interrupt its progress, and do not allow it to pass till it has accumulated in sufficient force to push them before it, and so escape. In consequence of which it is always being checked in its advance; and during these stoppages a most important work goes on upon it at leisure.

You must understand first, that the substances of which our food is composed, and which are afterwards decomposed in the stomach, are not all invited to enter the blood. Our aliments are something like the stones which the gold-seekers of California reduce to powder in order to extract therefrom the hidden particles of gold they contain. The gold of our food is that portion of it which the blood is able to appropriate to his own advantage; the rest he rejects as refuse. And this explains why a small slice of meat nourishes you more than a whole plateful of salad. Meat is a stone absolutely full of gold, while the salad has only a few veins of it here and there, and by far the greater part of the material it sends to the intestines, has, in consequence, to be thrown away.

Now it is in the first portion of the small intestine, the part known by the Latin name duodenum, which signifies twelve (because it is about the length of twelve finger-breadths), that the division takes place between the parts which go to nourish the blood, and those which are useless refuse. It is an important operation as you may suppose, and were the chyme to pass rapidly through the small intestine the gold would run the risk of being carried off with the refuse.

After the delay in the stomach, the food-substances make another halt in the duodenum, which, being very thin and slender, would have great difficulty in containing them at the time of their grand entry, an hour or two after a meal, were it not that it possesses the property of expanding itself to such an extent, that it swells out on grand occasions to the usual size of the stomach itself, so that it has sometimes been considered as a second stomach. And no doubt the operation which takes place in it gives it a claim to the appellation, for thereby the finishing stroke is put to the work previously begun in the stomach, and one may fairly say that, but for this last touch, very little would be accomplished at all.

Above the duodenum , and hid behind the stomach, is a kind of sponge, similar in nature to those we have already observed in the mouth. To this has been given the somewhat ridiculous name of pancreas ; I call it ridiculous because it is derived from two Greek words which signify
all flesh ; whereas the pancreas , which is a sponge of the same description as the salivary glands, presents the appearance of a grayish granulous mass which is not fleshy at all. Whatever be its name, however, our sponge communicates with the duodenum through a small tube, by means of which it pours into the chyme , as it accumulates, a copious supply of a fluid exactly like the saliva of the mouth.

Just by the place where the tube from the pancreas empties itself into the duodenum , another tube arrives bringing also a fluid, but of a different sort. This last comes from the liver, where there is a manufactory of bile -an unpleasant yellowish-green liquid, the name of which you have no doubt heard before, and which plays a very important part in the transformation of the aliments.

These new agents, the bile and the liver, are far too important to be passed over in a few words; I reserve them, therefore, for my next letter. Meantime, not to leave you longer in suspense, I may say that the separation between the gold and the refuse in the chyme takes place as soon as the latter has received the two liquids furnished by the liver and the pancreas . If you ask in what manner the division is accomplished, I confess, to my shame, that I am not able to explain it! What takes place there is a chemical process, and hereafter I shall have occasion to explain the meaning of that phrase. But the Great Chemist has not in this instance seen fit to divulge to man the secret of the work.

Indeed, you must prepare yourself beforehand, my dear child, to meet with many other mysteries besides this, if we pursue to the end our study of this flesh and bone which constitute the body of man. And here I recall what Camille Desmoulins is reported to have said about St. Just, viz., that he carried his head as high as if it were a consecrated Host.

[Footnote: The young Protestant reader who has never lived in a Catholic country, will perhaps need to be told, that what is here called Consecrated Host, is the sacramental wafer, or communion bread of the church. In French called hostie , in Italian, ostia .

In all their religious processions, which are very frequent, the