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

and intelligent companion, who almost reads your thoughts in your eyes, and is as affectionate and obedient to his master as it were to be wished all children were to their parents-this dog is, as you must own, very superior, in all ways, to the frog, with its large goggle eyes and clammy body, hiding itself in the water as soon as you come near it. But again, the frog, which can come and go as it likes, is decidedly superior to the oyster, which has neither head nor limbs, and lives all alone, glued into a shell, in a sort of perpetual imprisonment.

Now the machine I have been telling you about is found in the oyster and in the frog as well as in the dog, only it is less complicated, and therefore less perfect in the oyster than in the frog; and less perfect again in the frog than in the dog; for as we descend in the scale of animals we find it becoming less and less elaborate-losing here one of its parts, there another, but nevertheless remaining still the same machine to all intents and purposes; though by the time it has reached its lowest condition of structure we should hardly be able to recognize it again, if we had not watched it through all its gradations of form, and escorted it, as it were, from stage to stage.

Let me make this clear to you by a comparison.

You know the lamp which is lit every evening on the drawing-room table, and around which you all assemble to work or read. Take off first the shade, which throws the light on your book-then the glass which prevents it smoking-then the little chimney which holds the wick and drives the air into the flame to make it burn brightly. Then take away the screw, which sends the wick up and down; undo the pieces one by one, until none remain but those absolutely necessary to having a light at all-namely, the receptacle for the oil and the floating wick which consumes it.

Now if any one should come in and hear you say, "Look at my lamp," what would he reply? He would most likely ask at once, "What lamp?"-for there would be very little resemblance to a lamp in that mere ghost of one before him.

But to you, who have seen the different parts removed one after another, that wick soaked in oil (let your friend shake his head about it as he pleases) will still be the lamp to you, however divested of much that made it once so perfect, and however dimly it may shine in consequence.

And this is exactly what happens when the machine we are discussing is examined in the different grades of animals. The ignoramus who has not followed it through its changes and reductions cannot recognize it when it is presented to him in its lowest condition; but any one who has carefully observed it throughout, knows that it is, in point of fact, the same machine still.

This, then, is what we are now going to look at together, my dear little girl. We will study first, piece by piece, the exquisite machine within ourselves, which is of such unceasing use to us as long as we do not give it more than a proper share of work to perform. Do you understand? We will see what becomes of the mouthful of bread which you place so coolly between your teeth, as if when that was done nothing further remained to be thought about. We will trace it in its passage through every part of the machine, from beginning to end. It will therefore be simply only the History of a Mouthful of Bread I am telling you, even while I seem to be talking of other matters; for to make that comprehensible I shall have to enter into a good many explanations.

And when you have thoroughly got to understand the history of what you eat yourself, we will look a little into the history of what other animals eat, beginning by those most like ourselves, and going on to the rest in regular succession downwards. And while we are on the subject, I will say a word or two on the way in which vegetables eat, for, as you remember, I have stated that they do eat also.

Do you think this is likely to interest you, and be worth the trouble of some thought and attention?

Perhaps you may tell me it sounds very tedious, and like making a great fuss about a trifle; that you have all your life eaten mouthfuls of bread without troubling yourself as to what became of them, and yet have not been stopped growing by your ignorance, any more than the little cat, who knows no more how it happens than you do.

True, my dear; but the cat is only a little cat, and you are a little girl. Up to the present moment you and she have known, one as much as the other on this subject, and on that point you have therefore had no superiority over her. But she will never trouble herself about it, and will always remain a little cat. You, on the contrary, are intended by God to become something more in intelligence than you are now, and it is by learning more than the cat that you will rise above her in this respect. To learn, is the duty of all men, not only for the pleasure of curiosity and the vanity of being called learned, but because in proportion to what we learn we approach nearer to the destiny which God has appointed to man, and when we walk obediently in the path which God himself has marked out for us, we necessarily become better.

It is sometimes said to grown-up people, that it is never too late to learn. To children one may say that it is never too early to learn. And among the things which they may learn, those which I want now to teach you have the double merit of being, in the first place amusing, and afterwards, and above all, calculated to accustom you to think of God, by causing you to observe the wonders which He has done. Sure am I that when you know them you will not fail to admire them; moreover I promise your mother that you will be all the better, as well as wiser, for the study.


FIRST PART.-MAN.

LETTER II.

THE HAND.

At the foot of the mountains, from whence I write to you, my dear child, when we want to show the country to a stranger, we commence by making him climb one of the heights, whence he may take in at a glance the whole landscape below, all the woods and villages scattered over the plain, even up to the blue line of the Rhine, which stretches out to the distant horizon. After this he will easily find his way about.

It is to the top of a mountain equally useful that I have just led you. It has cost you some trouble to climb with me. You have had to keep your eyes very wide open that you might see to the end of the road we had to go together. Now then, let us come down and view the country in detail. Then we shall go as if we were on wheels.

And now let us begin at the beginning:

Well, doubtless, as the subject is eating, you will expect me to begin with the mouth.

Wait a moment; there is something else first. But you are so accustomed to make use of it, that you have never given it a thought, I dare say.

It is not enough merely that one should have a mouth; we must be able to put what we want within it. What would you do at dinner, for instance, if you had no hands?

The hand is then the first thing to be considered.

I shall not give you a description of it; you know what it is like. But what, perhaps, you do not know, because you have never thought about it, is, the reason why your hand is a more convenient, and consequently more perfect, instrument than a cat's paw, for instance, which yet answers a similar purpose, for it helps the cat to catch mice.

Among your five fingers there is one which is called the thumb, which stands out on one side quite apart from the others. Look at it with respect; it is to these two little bones, covered over with a little flesh, that man owes part of his physical superiority to other animals. It is one of his best servants, one of the noblest of God's gifts to him. Without the thumb three-fourths (at least) of human arts would yet have to be invented; and to begin with, the art not only of carrying the contents of one's plate to one's mouth, but of filling the plate (a very important question in another way) would, but for the thumb, have had difficulties to surmount of which you can form no idea.

Have you noticed that when you want to take hold of anything (a piece of bread, we will say, as we are on the subject of eating), have you noticed that it is always the thumb who puts himself forward, and that he is always on one side by himself, whilst the rest of the fingers are on the other? If the thumb is not helping, nothing remains in your hand, and you don't know what to do with it. Try, by way of experiment, to carry your spoon to your mouth without putting your thumb to it, and you will see what a long time it will take you to get through a poor little plateful of broth. The thumb is placed in such a manner on your hand that it can face each of the other fingers one after another, or all together, as you please; and by this we are enabled to grasp, as if with a pair of pincers, whatever object, whether large or small. Our hands owe their perfection of usefulness to this happy arrangement, which has been bestowed on no other animal, except the monkey, our nearest neighbor.

I may even add, while we are about it, that it is this which distinguishes the hand from a paw or a foot. Our feet, which have other things to do than to pick up apples or lay hold of a fork, our feet have also each five fingers, but the largest cannot face the others; it is not a thumb, therefore, and it is because of this that our feet are not hands. Now the monkey has thumbs on the four members corresponding to our arms and legs, and thus we may say that he has hands at the end of his legs as well as of his arms. Nevertheless, he is not on that account better off than we are, but quite the contrary. I will explain this to you presently.

To return to our subject. You see that it was necessary, before saying anything about the mouth, to consider the hand, which is the mouth's purveyor. Before the cook lights the fires the maid must go to market, must she not? And it is a very valuable maid that we have here: what would become of us without her?

If we were in the habit of giving thought to everything, we should never even gather a nut without being grateful to the Providence which has provided us with the thumb, by means of which we are able to do