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

Conic Sections , which was the wonder of all the learned men of the day. I have not a very clear idea of what Conic Sections are myself; but I tell you this to show that Pascal was a very profound and learned man, under whose authority, therefore, I am very glad to take shelter, now that I am going to set before you the very startling points of resemblance which exist between you and the beasts.

As to your greatness, it delights me to explain it to you. It is not due to the handsome clothes you wear when you are going out, nor to the luxurious furniture of mamma's drawing-room, but to the possession of that young soul which is beginning to dawn within you, as the sun rises in the morning sky, and pierces through the early mists; in that growing intelligence which has enabled you to understand so far all the pretty stories I have told you; in that fresh unsullied conscience, which congratulates you when you have been good, and reproves you when you have done wrong: all of them gifts which are not bestowed on the lower animals, or certainly not to the same extent as upon you-gifts by which you rise more and more above them, the more they are developed in yourself. Your baseness-but, begging Pascal's pardon, I cannot call it baseness-your connecting link with the brute creation lies in those other gifts of God which you and they share in common-in those wonders of your organization, which we shall now meet with in them again, in full perfection at first, and that in every respect; by which fact you may learn, if you never thought of it before, that the lower animals come from the same creating hand as yourself, and ought to be looked upon to some extent as younger brothers, however distasteful such a notion may seem at first. Societies have been established of late, both in France and England, for the protection of animals; and a noble and honorable task they have undertaken, in spite of the jokes that have been made at their expense. It is a mischievous cavil to tell people who are doing good in one direction, that more might have been done somewhere else. Everything hangs together in the progress of public morality, and you cannot strike a blow at cruelty to animals without at the same time making a hit at cruelty to man. And the best argument in favor of the rights of beasts to protection, will be found in the tour you and I are now going to make together through the different classes of the animal creation.

Let us begin with the horse-one of the beasts which oftenest needs our protection. Give him the mouthful of bread whose history we have just finished. He accepts it as a treat, and needs no pressing to eat it. And if it could tell you all its adventures afterwards, you would find that you were listening to precisely the same story as your own over again; that nothing was different, nothing wanting. First of all-teeth to grind it, and a tongue to swallow it with, as a matter of course. Next a larynx , which hides itself to avoid it, and an oesophagus,* which receives it, just as in your case; a stomach with its
gastric juices , the same as yours, in bagpipe form, and its pylorus , like your own; a lesser intestine , into which bile pours from a liver like yours; chyliferous vessels which suck up a milky chyle, as with you; farther on a large intestine ; and so on to the end. Nor is this all:-the horse has also a heart, with its two ventricles , and its double play of valves; a heart which the little girl in our tale might confidently have exhibited to the engineers as her own, but that it would have been somewhat too big, of course; into which heart, as into ours, comes venous blood, to be changed afterwards to arterial ; in lungs to which the air keeps rushing, forced thither by the see-saw action of a diaphragm , as faithful a servant to him as to you. And those lungs like our own, are a charcoal market: the same exchange takes place there, of carbonic acid for oxygen, as in ours, an unanswerable proof that the stove inside the horse burns fuel in the same way as our own: and if you were to place the thermometer inside his mouth (for we are polite enough to call it his mouth), it would mark 37 1-2 degrees of heat (centigrade)-a difference from ourselves not worth mentioning. Finally, if you examine his blood, you will meet with the same serum and clot , the whole company of hydroclorates, phosphates, carbonates, &c. , from which we shrank before, and globules made like your own; having the same construction, and the same life, or action, if you like it better. I need scarcely add that 100 oz. of its
fibrine and albumen contain:

Of carbon......... 63 oz.
Of hydrogen........ 7

This is understood all along as being the case everywhere, from man down to the turnip; so that, like you, this noble animal, as the horse is called, is in point of fact only so much carbon, so much water, and so much air, joined to a handful of salt, which represents the earth's share in the bodies of animals.

You must confess that, if we cannot quite call the horse a fellow-creature, he is nevertheless very like us. And it is the same with all those animals which man makes use of as his servants, and which have really a sort of right to the protection of society, since they form, to a certain extent, a portion of the human family. I do not speak here of the dog, who pays his taxes, poor fellow, in his quality of friend to man.

When I think of the almost identical organization of man and his next-door neighbors, I am astonished how it could possibly have come into the head of a certain learned individual (I will not mention his name), when drawing up a plan of natural history, to give to man a separate kingdom, as a sequel to the three kingdoms already established-the mineral, vegetable, and animal. One might have forgiven Pascal if such an idea had got into his head after writing his treatise on Conic Sections; there being nothing in them to throw light on such a subject. But in a naturalist, an observer who had spent his life in the study of living creatures, the thing seems almost incredible. Possibly he had reasons for what he did, but he certainly did not find them in the subjects of his studies.

Forgive me, my dear child, for forgetting you in this fit of indignation upon a point you cannot care much about. It leads me naturally enough to my present business, which is none of the easiest, but you must help me by paying attention. I am going to describe the classification of the animal kingdom .

There are a terrible number of animals, as you know; and if we wish to study them to any real purpose, we must begin by introducing some sort of order into the innumerable crowds which throng, pell-mell, around us for observation. We should otherwise never know where to begin, or when we had come to an end.

There are many ways of setting a crowd in order, but they all go upon the same plan. The individuals composing the crowd are parcelled off into companies, each company having a distinguishing mark peculiar to those who compose it. Thus the first division is into a few large companies, which are afterwards subdivided into smaller ones, and those into others still less, until the divisions have gone far enough. And this is what is called a classification .

Let us imagine, as an example, a large crowd in a public garden; I will soon classify it for you. I shall put the men on one side and the women on the other. Then-to begin with the women-I shall subdivide them into married and single. Then among married women I shall make a company of mammas, and another of those who have no children. Among the unmarried I shall have a group of those who have never been married-girls, that is-and another of widows-those who were once married, but are so no longer. Then, following the girls, I shall separate them into tall and short. And among the short ones I shall divide the brunettes from the blondes, and so I shall get at last to a little blonde girl, whose classification (were she a soldier) in military rank would be as follows:- squadron of blondes; company of shorts; battalion of girls; regiment of unmarried women; division of women. The division of men could be carried out in the same manner; and thus we should classify our mob into complete military order. This is easy enough, however; but the classifying of animals is a very different affair, and I will tell you why. We ourselves require a classification to study them by, though none was needed for their creation. The Almighty has formed them all on one uniform plan, around which He has, if I may so express it, lavished an infinity of modifications separating species from species, yet without placing between the different species those fixed barriers which we should require now to enable us to classify them strictly. You who are learning the pianoforte have perhaps been told the meaning of a theme of music-the first idea of the composer who follows it throughout the piece from one end to the other, embroidering on it, as on a bit of canvas, a thousand variations melting one into another. Such is pretty nearly, if we may venture the comparison, the way in which we can picture to ourselves the Almighty moving through the work of animal creation. Step in afterwards and divide away into regiments and battalions, if you please. Nature permits it, but she will never, to accommodate your classifications, separate what in her is really united.

There is still a way, however, and that is to do as I did just now in the case of the crowd. To take, viz., only one character (as we call a distinguishing mark in natural history), and to throw together all the individuals which possess it, the blondes, the shorts, the girls, &c. In this way it may soon be done; but what is the result? You are in one class, your eldest sister is in another, your mamma in a third, and your brother in a different division altogether, a long way from you all. Such a classification is called artificial , and you can see at once that it is worthless.

The most natural plan is to put together those that are of the same family; and the classifications made on this principle are called
natural classifications.

It is a classification of this sort which has been adopted for the animal kingdom. People have taken all the animals which possess in common not one character only, but a collection of characters of the most important kind, dominant characters , as they are called; and of these animals they have formed, to begin with, large primary groups; subdividing these afterwards according to the secondary differences, which distinguish different species in the same group from each other.

In this manner all the different sorts of animals