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

anything-metals excepted-which is not crammed with oxygen. Your very body, to conclude with, would become so small a thing, were the oxygen it contains extracted from it, that you would be perfectly amazed.

So when I told you oxygen was king of the world, I did not say too much, did I? Between ourselves too, it is a great misfortune that people live on so complacently in total ignorance of this all-important material, which is connected with everything, which insinuates itself everywhere, which we make use of every instant of our lives, which may almost be said to be in some sort our very selves, since it constitutes three-fourths of our body, but whose name nevertheless would, I am certain, make many pretty little mouths pout, if one were to utter it in a drawing-room.

This is really the case. Many young ladies who are proud to know who Caractacus was, would be ashamed to know anything about oxygen. There is a foolish notion that women have no business with such subjects, probably because children are supposed not to breathe and mothers are not required to watch over them?

This reminds me that we are on the road to explain respiration, which I had almost forgotten in lifting up this corner of the veil behind which Nature hides her most valuable secrets from the idle and ignorant.

It is oxygen then, which the blood carries off triumphantly from his interview with the air in the cells of the lungs; and, by the way, it is, thanks to this oxygen that it returns from the lungs to the heart, and so from the heart to the organs, with that beautiful rosy tint which distinguishes arterial from venous blood.

Now the blood gives out this oxygen on its road every time it performs the journey, and the perpetual course it performs from the lungs to the organs, and from the organs to the lungs, has for its chief object the perpetual renovation of this previous provision, which is as perpetually consumed.

Do you ask of what use it is? Does the blood leave it at random in our organs, and is it one of the materials with which our steward is constantly providing the little workmen of the body for their various constructions?

No, my dear child. The proverb "One cannot live upon air," is a very true one, although it is equally true that we cannot live without air. Air does not nourish our organs; on the contrary, it consumes them, and what we eat, serves to supply in precisely the same proportion its insatiable appetite. When we leave off eating, from whatever cause, the air does not leave off too. He goes on always just the same, and that is the reason why people who are starved to death are so thin. (The air has consumed the vital parts.)

You did not expect this; but now prepare yourself to go on from one surprise to another. To begin with, I shall have to stop here and explain to you before we go any further-can you guess what? Nay, I am sure you cannot; FIRE.

There is not much connection, you will say, between fire and
breathing .

But there you are mistaken. It is precisely the same thing, as I will prove to you next time.


LETTER XXI.

COMBUSTION.

Have you never, my dear child, whilst warming your little feet on the hearth in winter-time, asked yourself, What is fire? that great benefactor of man; fire, without which part of the world would be uninhabitable by us during at least a third of the year; fire, without which we could not bake a morsel of bread, and would have to eat our meat raw; fire, which lights up the night for us, and without which we should have to go to bed when the hens go to roost; fire, which subdues metals, and without which we should have neither iron, nor copper, nor silver, nor anything that is manufactured from those materials; fire, without which, in short, human industry could not rise to much higher results than that of the monkey and of the beaver?

We are all of us, it is true, so much accustomed to fire that we do not pay much attention to it, and have a sort of persuasion that lucifer matches have existed from all eternity. But the first men, who were nearer neighbors to that great discovery whence all others have originated-the first men treated fire with more respect than we do. It was to them one of the mighty things of the world. The ancient Persians made a god of it, and told how Zoroaster, their prophet, went to seek it in heaven, passing thither from the top of the Himalayas, the highest chain of mountains in the known world.

The old Greeks pretended that Prometheus stole it from the gods, to make a present of it to man, which came to nearly the same thing as the Persian account. The Romans had their sacred fire , which the celebrated Vestals were bound to keep lighted, on pain of death to whoever should let it go out. At the present day we do not stand upon such ceremonies, but warm our feet at it quite familiarly, without wishing for anything further. But you would see a terrible revolution in the world if some Prometheus reversed were, some fine morning, to steal it from us, and carry it back to its ancient owners. Every branch of human industry would suddenly stop, as if by enchantment, and in the course of a very few years the poor little framework of human society, of which we are now so proud, would totally change its aspect, and the whole world would be turned topsy-turvy.

But do not be alarmed; there is no danger of the sort. Fire is not a present once made to man, but liable to be taken away from him at will. It is a law of nature which existed before the human race came into being, and which will doubtless continue to exist when the human race shall have disappeared. The existence of fire is connected in the most intimate way with that of that great king of the world of whom we spoke last time-Oxygen. Fire is the wedding-feast of Oxygen with other substances!

When kings are married, what rejoicings there are! what a commotion! what illuminations! It is only right and proper, then, that the king of the world should have rejoicings and illuminations at his weddings also. And they have never been wanting. The rejoicings are the warmth which rejoices us; the illuminations, the flame which gives us light. But man, in his dealings with nature, is an imperious subject, such as few earthly kings are troubled with-happily for them! Whenever he wants warmth and light he forces the king of the world to get married, and then takes advantage of the feast; nothing worse than that.

"How so?" you exclaim. "If I want to make a fire with stones or iron, I should never succeed. Is this because oxygen never unites himself with those substances, nor with heaps of others which are equally useless in lighting a fire? Yet you told me that oxygen was to be met with almost everywhere."

It is a fair question, my dear child; but my answer is, that what you said last is precisely the reason why all substances are not fit for making fire of. When oxygen is already there, as he is in stones, for instance, the marriage is over-the feast cannot begin again. Kings are like other people in this respect; their weddings are only celebrated once. If you had happened to be present at the moment when oxygen was united to the materials of which stones are composed, you would have seen a feast of which I should like to have heard some news. I was not there myself either; but learned men in these latter days have succeeded in breaking the bonds which united oxygen with the primitive substances in certain fragments of stone, and with these substances thus freed, and consequently able to remarry, they have been enabled to give us, in miniature, the spectacle of the festivities of a fresh wedding. And I can assure you it is enough to make one shudder, to think of the time when such a marriage must have taken place on a large scale.

With regard to iron the case is quite different.

You have without doubt heard tell of Louis XIV. (of France), that proud king who was called le Grand , and who is said to have heard himself compared to the sun, without smiling. It seems that he one day took it into his head to marry, it is difficult to say why, with Madame de Maintenon, the old wife of a poor paralytic poet named Scarron, who, as such, however, was only known by some few farces. Do you suppose that the palace of Versailles was illuminated in honor of this marriage? Not a bit of it. It was a disgraceful marriage, which they were bound to keep secret. The ceremony was conducted mysteriously and without lighting a single candle more than ordinary.

I do not pretend to say that oxygen has any of these weaknesses, nor that he is any more partial to marrying with one body more than with another. In the good God's great world, outside of the family of man, they know nothing of our foolish pride, of our little weaknesses. It is nevertheless a fact that this dear monarch has his preferences, and that all his marriages are not made in this fashion.

Leave those pretty little scissors of yours, with which you would try in vain to make a fire, outside your window for two or three days, and then observe the dreadful, scaly, red stain which you are sure to find on them afterwards, and which is called rust. Have you any idea whence it proceeds? I will tell you. It comes from the oxygen, which has been making one of those cheerless secret marriages with the iron of your scissors. So there have been no pretty sights nor sounds, no lights nor cheerful noises to entertain anybody, and though people may have wished for them ever so much, they have had to do without them.

I will tell you the true reason of these marriages incognito. It is because oxygen is but feebly attracted by iron, who does not stand so high in his good graces as many other bodies, and so (to continue the joke) he unites slowly and languidly with him, as we may say.

Now tell me, when you set fire to a bit of paper, how long does it take to burn?

Half a minute, at the utmost, you answer.

Very good. And how long does it take to produce that rust-stain, even though it is probably not a hundredth part the size of the paper?

Two or three days, is your reply, for so I told you my self.

Here is a strange difference indeed; but from it you may discover why you have not seen any signs of rejoicing or illuminations at the iron wedding. These are always in proportion to the quantity of oxygen which is being married at once-and this was-oh, such a slow affair! When the quantity is very small indeed, the festal illuminations are very small indeed too, and in fact escape observation altogether. In the same way that you would not be conscious of little bits of thread laid delicately one after another on your back,