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

thing you are well acquainted with. Put your hand on your chest next time you laugh (and I hope it will be soon) and you will feel how it dances-thanks to the diaphragm which jumps for joy whenever it finds you in good humor.

Please to observe further, that nothing of all this is done to order. He starts of himself, poor fellow, without waiting to ask if you will ever know anything about it; and, in truth, you have known nothing about it up to the present moment.

What say you to the diaphragm now, my child? Does not the very name please you? You scarcely expected to find there-under your lungs-so good a servant, one so attached to your person, so strongly resembling in all points the best specimens we know among men. And still we have not done. I have reserved as a finale for you a new point of resemblance which will make you open your eyes very wide indeed.

The old servant is sometimes cross and grumbling. If anything is going against his grain in the house he has no scruple in saying so; and his mode of speaking is sometimes rather rude. Nor is it of any use to get impatient and impose silence on him; he will listen to nothing-it is his privilege. But let some unforeseen accident happen to his master, let him see him deeply affected, and in a moment all his anger is over. He sets himself silently to work again, recalled to order twenty times sooner by his master's emotion than by his utmost impatience.

You ask what I am coming to now? My dear child, what I have just told you is the history of the hiccup -the history of the hiccup, neither more nor less.

I must first tell you, however, that the diaphragm keeps up intimate relations with his neighbor below-the stomach. Every time he rises in the breast the stomach rises behind him; and not only the stomach, but also its companions, the intestines. All the officials employed in the business of digestion travel regularly with him; coming down as well as going up in company. Put your hand upon your abdomen and breathe strongly and you will feel the rebound of all the movements of the diaphragm.

Now, when matters are going on wrongly inside, when too much work has been imposed on the officials, or work they dislike, or else when they have been disturbed in their labors, it will sometimes happen that the
diaphragm takes part with his comrades in the abdomen. He gets angry then, and shakes his master, who cannot help himself a bit. You must be very well acquainted with these attacks, which are very fatiguing when they last long. One begs pardon and resists him in vain; he does as he pleases, without stopping to listen, turning everything upside down; and do you know the only efficacious plan for calming him at once? It was a constant source of wonder to me when I was little. A sudden fright, a start unexpectedly caused by a friendly hand slipping secretly behind, and laying hold of one, was all-sufficient; disarmed by the agitation you have undergone, the naughty, stubborn muscle forgives you, and you are cured.

Having dwelt so long on the truly wonderful resemblance between the proceedings of two sorts of beings, whom no one that I know of ever thought of comparing together before, I will now, my dear child, give you the key to all these comparisons, which seem so whimsical at first, but are so striking in reality, and which come to my pen of their own accord, as it were, in the midst of the explanations I have undertaken to give you. Many people who would not themselves care for them, will declare that they are too hard for a little girl to follow. But for my own part, I find that the eye can take in a mountain as easily as a fly, and that it is not more difficult to lay hold of great ideas than of little ones. It is short-sighted people, not children, who cannot see far before them. Who made the heavens and the earth? God, your catechism tells you. The same God made both; did he not? We do not acknowledge two. And if it be the self-same God who made everything, the hand of the universal Maker will be found everywhere; and from the highest to the lowest portion of His work the same mind will manifest itself under a thousand different forms. Not only, either, is each man separately, one by one, the work of God. The whole human race, taken in the mass, is also His creation; and the laws by which human society-that great body of the human race-seeks to regulate itself for the preservation of its existence, are undoubtedly the same as those which overruled the organization of our individual bodies. It is not very astonishing, then, if we find, in the life of human society around us, details corresponding with each detail of the life of the human body, or, at any rate, closely resembling them. What would really be astonishing, would be that mankind as a whole should be differently constituted from man as an individual, and that human society should have other appointed conditions of well-being than those of each of its members.

So, while I am on the subject, I should like to advise those who wishto apply themselves to what is called politics -that is to say, social life-to begin their studies of the body social, by studying the body human, first. They will learn more from it than from the newspapers!

But you have nothing to do with all this. For the present, take notice of one thing only; viz., that the hand of the same God has passed over everything, and that there is neither much presumption nor much merit in tracing points of comparison between the different parts of His work. These comparisons are not a mere play of the mind; they really exist ready made in the very foundations of things.

Now let us come down a little from these heights and return to our friends the lungs. I have not spoken about them for some time, and I have not yet told you how they are constructed.

I wish I could show you some, but the cook will do so, if you would like to see them. The lights with which she feeds the cat and the dog are the lungs of some animal.

Take up a piece in your hand, and you will find you have got hold of something light (cooks have not given it its name without a reason), which is also soft, sinks under your finger if you press it, and rises again afterwards like a sponge. In fact, the lung, like the sponge, is composed of an infinity of minute cells, whose elastic sides can be contracted or expanded at will. They are like so many little chambers, into every one of which blood and air keep running hastily, each on its own side, to bid good day to each other, touch hands, and then hurry out as briskly as they came in. Whether the bit of lights the cat is eating, comes from an ox, a pig, or a sheep, you may look at it with perfect confidence; your own lung is precisely like it. You would see nothing different, could you look into your own chest.

So much for the substance of the lungs. As to SHAPE, imagine two large, elongated packets, flat inside, descending right and left, inside the breast, and bearing the heart, suspended between the two, in the middle. The extremity of each packet descends below the heart, and it is in the interval which separates them that the arch of the diaphragm performs its up and down movement.

I have already said that air reaches the lungs through the larynx . The
larynx (of which we shall speak further when I have explained another curious thing very valuable to little girls-the voice), the larynx is a tube composed of five pieces of cartilage (you know now what
cartilage or gristle is), the firm resisting texture of which keeps it always open. After these five pieces of cartilage , come others, and the tube is continued; but it then takes the name of the trachea ; the
larynx and trachea constituting the windpipe . At its entrance into the chest, the trachea divides into two branches, which are called
bronchial tubes , and which run, one into the right lung, the other into the left. You sometimes hear people talking about bronchitis . It is an inflammation of these bronchial tubes , which are within an inch or two of the lungs. It is necessary, therefore, to be very careful in such circumstances, and do exactly what the doctor prescribes, because- one step further, and the inflammation extends from the bronchial tubes into the lungs themselves, with which it is not safe to play tricks.

Having reached the lungs, the bronchial tubes subdivide into branches, which ramify again in their turn like the boughs of a tree, and the whole ramification terminates in imperceptible little tubes, each of which comes out in one of those little chambers I was talking about just now. And this is the way in which air gets there at all.

The venous blood which leaves the heart, arrives on its side by one large canal, which passes out from the right ventricle, and which is called the pulmonary artery . And, to tell you the truth, while there is no learned man present to be angry with us, it is a very ill-chosen name, because it is venous blood which flows in this so-called
artery . But the doctors have decided that all the vessels which run from the heart should be called arteries , and all those which go back to it veins , whatever may be the nature of the blood which they contain. We cannot help it, because they manage all these matters in their own way; but in that case it was scarcely worth their while to talk about arterial and venous blood. It would have been better to have said simply, red blood and black blood.

Be this as it may, venous blood arrives from the right ventricle through the pulmonary artery . This divides itself, like the bronchial tubes , into thousands of little pipes, whose extremities come creeping along the partitions of the little chambers in question.

And here, then, takes place, between the air and the blood, that mysterious intercourse for the account of which I have kept you waiting so long; and at the end of which the black blood becomes red, or, in other words, from venous becomes arterial. I have called it "intercourse," and this is really the proper phrase; for this transformation of the blood is accomplished by means of an exchange. The air gives something to the blood, and the blood gives something to the air-each giving, in exchange, like two people over a bargain in the marketplace.

With your permission, my dear child, we will stop here to-day. We have now got to the charcoal market, and it is a little black.


LETTER XX.

CARBON AND OXYGEN.

Here, then, my dear child, we have arrived at the explanation of that great mystery, WHY we breathe. Keep on the