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

uniformity of temperature which, happily, human imprudence cannot disturb. But the blood has a second resource for getting rid of its superfluity of hydrogen and carbon, and herein especially is displayed the beautiful foresight with which everything about us has been prearranged. We are told that wolves, when they get hold of a larger piece of meat than they care to eat at the moment, carry off what they do not want to some corner and bury it in the ground, whence they get it again when their hunger returns. Dogs sometimes do the same; and the blood has a similar instinct. Listen attentively, for this is very interesting.

I light a candle and you see a bright flame, which will last as long as there is any tallow below the wick. Can you tell me what it proceeds from?

Nay, do not laugh at the question; it is quite to the purpose, I assure you.

We know, do we not, that the substances which burn best are those which are full of hydrogen and carbon? Tallow, then, is one of those substances. But tell me further, if you please, what is tallow?

Tallow is mutton fat , allow me to say, if you never heard it before.

Now comes the question, who provided the sheep's fat with such a quantity of hydrogen and carbon as to qualify it for making candles?

The sheep's blood undoubtedly, since blood is the purveyor-general of living bodies-of the sheep's body as well as of our own.

But how came it that the sheep's blood had so large a stock of these materials?

Undoubtedly, again, because there was more of them in the food the sheep had eaten than the oxygen was able to consume or the liver to employ. In short, the sheep has lungs and a bile-manufactory, as we have; oxygen performs the same office for it as for us. What takes place in its body in the matter of respiration is an exact counterpart of what happens in ours, and the history of its fat is simply the history of our own.

Now do you think it is for our sakes that the sheep's blood deposits its fat in little pellet-like morsels throughout the body; do you suppose the poor creature works in this manner merely to have the honor of providing us with candles? It is not likely. I was talking about the wolf just now; but there is no need to look beyond ourselves. In many poor people's cottages there is somewhere an old earthen pot in which the savings of each day are carefully put by, penny by penny, as a last resource in time of need. Should a wicked thief succeed in murdering the owner and laying hold of the treasure, he will squander in a few hours of brilliant revelry the precious hoard so slowly got together as a provision for possible needs. And this is what man does, when he kills the sheep and takes its fat to make candles of! The poor animal's blood knew well that bad times might come, that grass might fail, and the combustible matter conveyed into the body become insufficient to maintain its thirty-nine or forty degrees of heat (which is the sheep's measure, who is rather hotter than we are). So it quietly laid up its surplus stock of combustible so conveniently brought to hand, and destined to be burnt little by little in the depths of the organs, should times of scarcity arise. But here steps in man, the universal thief of Nature, and turns it into a beautiful flame, regardless of cost, and burns in one evening what his victim had been economizing for so long. To burn for burning's sake, however, has always been the fate of tallow, the only difference being in the way it is done. Like the poor man's clumsy pence, which were put by to be spent some day or other, only in another manner. It is worth noting here, that some of the Russian soldiers who were in France in 1815 had a very good idea of restoring candles to their original destiny. As children of the north, driven to get fire wherever they could, they ate all the candle-ends they could lay hold of, preferring to burn the tallow, sheep's fashion, inside rather than out!

Fat is, then, the savings' bank of the blood; there it deposits its savings, and there it can always find them again in time of need. Witness the fat pig described by Liebig, the great German chemist, which having been swallowed up by a landslip, was found alive at the end of 160 days. Fat was out of the question there, of course; the animal weighed ten stone less than before. We will take the illustrious professor's word on trust, but were a few days subtracted from the account the case would still be a splendid example of the resource which blood finds in fat when other nourishment fails; for the pig had certainly been breathing during the whole 160 days, and as, in all probability, he moved about much slower than usual, his hydrogen and carbon fire was never extinguished for a single instant; of that I am perfectly certain, and you shall soon know why. It was well for the poor fellow himself that he had put by his provisions in time of plenty. And who suffered? Why, the pig's master, who had looked forward with pleasure to the rashers of bacon he should cut by and by from the stores of combustibles in his larder. For once Master Piggy ate his own bacon himself!

You understand now, I hope, by what ingenious management that marvellous stove, called an animal, never burns too much fuel, whatever be the quantity it is supplied with, and how, on the other hand, it has always as much as it wants.

I have now to explain how important it is that it should always have enough, and that this is not merely a question of heat and cold, as with dining-room stoves, but one of life and death! Cheer up! I have only one more word to say about Respiration, and when you have heard it you will appreciate still better the lesson of economy which you have learnt from Nature to-day.


LETTER XXIII.

ACTION OF THE BLOOD UPON THE ORGANS.

The first time we talked about the Blood, my dear little pupil, I introduced him to you as the steward of your body, and what a steward to be sure! Always awake, as you may remember, always in motion; his pockets ever full of the materials unceasingly required by the indefatigable builders of that human edifice in which it has pleased God to house your dear little self. If you wish really to understand what follows now, we must carry on the simile a little further.

A steward not only provides the workmen with materials, but gives them orders as well, and this is part of the blood's business also. He is not only commissary-general, but whipper-in of the whole household, and besides the care of giving out all the stores, has the charge to see that everything is properly done. The unhappy men who purchase prosperity at the dreadful cost of maintaining slavery, pretend that their slaves would do no work worth looking at, were there not always some one behind them with a whip in his hand. Well, our organs are slaves, and slaves of the worst sort. They would never do anything at all, if the blood were not everlastingly whipping them up in his ceaseless rounds. Let him come to a stand-still for one minute, for a second even, and everything stops short; then we are at once in the castle of the Sleeping Beauty in the wood. But perhaps I cannot do better than to compare our bodily machine to a violin-to hit upon something less dismal than slaves-a violin with blood for its bow. As long as the bow runs over the strings the violin makes music and lives; when the bow stops, it is silent and dies.

You have never yet had a fainting fit, my dear child; it rarely happens at your age. But you may possibly have seen somebody faint; or, at any rate, you have heard it talked about. Do you know what takes place in such cases? Now and then, in consequence of some violent emotion, but how or why I cannot tell you, all the blood rushes suddenly back towards the heart, as during an earthquake a river will sometimes flow back towards its source, leaving its bed dry. Thereupon the face turns white, as if to give notice that there is no longer anything red below the skin. The organs, no longer stimulated by the blood, leave off work altogether. The brain goes to sleep, the muscles relax, consciousness ceases, and you behold the poor body, from which the soul seems to have departed, give way on all sides, and fall to the ground like a corpse. This is not exactly death, but it is yet an interruption of life. It would be death if nature did not get the upper hand again, and send back the deserter to his post.

I may remark here that it was partly on this account that some of the ancients thought the soul was seated in the blood; not a bad idea for people who were determined to pronounce where the soul was, when it is so easy to say one knows nothing about it. But those who placed it in the breath, and who have bequeathed to us those beautiful expressions- yielding up the last breath-giving up the ghost -were not wrong neither.

In point of fact the blood is not the soul of the body; in other words, does not keep the body alive, otherwise than by keeping up unceasingly and everywhere that magic fire of which we were talking last time.

The French people, in their picturesque language, have found an expression, full of energy, to express the action exercised by the master workman, who knows how to make his people work: " Il vous met le feu sous le ventre. " [Footnote: Literally, he puts fire under their bellies; but here signifying that he makes it so hot that the organs are compelled to continue in motion.] This is, to the letter, the process employed by the blood to make the organs work. It makes a fire under the belly. Unhappily their work only lasts as long as the fire which causes the heat, and which is so necessary to life that it is almost confounded with it. It is the sacred fire of the Roman Vestals, which must be fed night and day under pain of death should it go out. Now, if to feed the sacred fire of life, it be necessary that the blood should everywhere find hydrogen and carbon
unattached , that is to say, free and ready to unite themselves to oxygen, it is no less necessary that he should bring oxygen with him everywhere. Else there would be no marriage, and therefore no fire. Oxygen is, then, the talisman which brings the organs to obedience. Without oxygen he would be a slave-driver without his whip; his orders would be despised. If the organs were to be deluged with venous blood-with that black blood which has lost its oxygen, they would not stir any more than if they had received so much water. They acknowledge nothing but arterial blood-red blood-blood rich in oxygen. That is what they respect, and which has authority over them; the other is a bankrupt who has lost his credit with his cash; those whom he fed but lately now