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

of its teeth is even more beautiful than that of the elephant's tusks, and that dentists carve it into very magnificent teeth for their patients. This is not a matter to interest you much at present, but we never know what may happen. I advise you, however, never to make use of hippopotamus's teeth; they turn yellow very quickly, and, when people are driven to buy teeth, the least they can try for, is to get good-looking ones for their money.

I should like to say something about the rhinoceros while we are on the colossal tribes, but it is a very unsatisfactory subject. The animal has no canines, sometimes no incisors even; sometimes it has as many as thirty-six teeth, according to the species, as naturalists aver; and this is all I have to say about this great lump of flesh, so misshapen outside, yet so regularly formed within. He it is who especially deserves the title pachydermata , his skin being so hard and thick that bullets glance off its surface. But this has nothing to do with our present subject, any more than the horn upon his nose, whose turn for description may come if I ever give you the history of the skin and all connected with it.

The hog also has canines, and very strong ones; but it is in the wild state, when it is called a boar, that these appear in their real form. There we find them projecting out of the mouth with a curve, as is so commonly seen among the pachydermata , forming those terrible, sharp, and pointed tusks which have been so often fatal to the hunter. The wild boar of the forest is supposed to be the original ancestor of the domestic pig; and if, as is probable, this is really the case, we have here a remarkable instance of the effect of man's treatment upon the organisation of the animals he collects around him. The wild boar lives only on fruits and roots, which, like the hippopotamus, he tears up with his tusks, those safeguards of his, amid the many perils of his life in the woods. In the service of man, on the contrary, he becomes lazy, cowardly, and greedy; unlearns his energy and combativeness, eats all that is offered to him in the trough, even meat, when it happens to be thrown in; and, in order to do this moreeasily, has recalled toward his mouth those formidable war-tusks of his, so tremendous as weapons, so useless as teeth; has, in fact, turned his sword into a fork. It is the case of a Tartar degenerated into a Chinaman. [Footnote: China, about which we have heard a great deal of late years, has been several times invaded by the warrior hordes of Tartary. But at each time, unto the second and third generations, the vanquishers have taken the effeminate manners, the costume and the usages of the vanquished, and so many conquests have only resulted in converting millions of Tartars into Chinese.]

This suggests to me an idea relative to the horse, the last important member of the pachydermata which remains to be spoken of. It also has its canines, but very small ones; they disappear, so to speak, in a large vacancy between the incisors and the molars, where man inserts the bit, by means of which the animal has been subdued. Small as these are, however, these canines indicate that the horse might eat flesh, canine teeth being the distinctive attribute of the carnivorous mammals. I have read somewhere, but I do not remember where, that an unusual development of strength could be produced in the horse by feeding it on flesh; and the old Greek poets write of a king [Footnote: Diomed, King of Thrace] in the barbarous ages who gave his horses, men for food. If I knew some rich professor who was inclined to spend money in the investigation of a curious fact, I would advise him to set apart a sum for putting horses on a meat diet, from sire to son, gradually increasing the quantity; and I would boldly warrant that in the course of successive generations the canines would become so large as to impede the entrance of the bit into the mouth, and, moreover, would make it rather a ticklish office for the groom to place it there. But let us set aside the teeth the horse might possibly have, in order to examine those it has already. There are six incisors in each jaw; these are long and rather projecting teeth, by examining which, the age of the horse can be detected from certain marks which appear in them from year to year. The molars are flat, square, furrowed with bars of enamel, marking out more or less distinct crescents; perfectly constructed, in short, for chewing hay and oats. Nevertheless, I should never be surprised to see the enamel crescents become sharp-cutting in our rich professor's stable; so skillful is the unseen Architect who created animals, in altering the house when the tenant changes his habits.

ORDER 8. Ruminantia (ruminants).

I shall retain through life a pleasant recollection of the
ruminants . Through them I obtained the first prize for natural history which was ever given in France to the pupils of the learned university. It is thirty years ago since this happened, and I own, without any false modesty, that even now the word ruminant rings very agreeably in my ear. It reminds me of one of the proudest moments of my life, of the honor done to me by the illustrious Geoffroy St. Hilaire, when he called me, a little college urchin, up to him, that he might have a nearer view, as he said, of the baby-professor who had spoken so well on ruminants. Yes, it is more than thirty years ago, for alas! it was in 1831. There needed no less an event, as I have told you before, than the revolution of 1830 in France to induce the big-wigs of education to sacrifice two hours per week in one class to the study of natural history. Yes, my dear child, it is only that short time ago since natural history became one of the subjects of study in French colleges; and the gray-haired men of the present day finished their education, as it is called, without having learnt a single word of what I am now taking the trouble to teach you, a mere child. You see you have come into the world just at the right time, and will be able to instruct others in your turn. But before giving lessons to other people you must first finish learning your own. Forgive me this involuntary reference to a happy time when I was not much more rational than you are. And now, let us return to our ruminants-those dear, good beasts, the nourishing fathers of the human race.


LETTER XXXII.

MAMMALIA- continued .

ORDER 8. Ruminants-continued .

Every created thing has an appointed part to perform; but there are some mysterious parts of which we cannot understand the drift. That of the ruminants, however, is so clearly marked out, that we detect it at a glance.

To qualify myself for supplying your young mind with the food I am going to offer it to-day, I have been obliged, my dear child, to browse in a good many books of which you could have understood but little yourself; and I have been forced to ruminate a long time upon what I have read, and to digest it slowly in my head, which I may say, without vanity, is of larger capacity than yours; no great wonder at my age. Now, if I have succeeded in my undertaking, you will benefit by all the work which has been going on in my mind for the purpose of feeding yours without over-fatigue to it; and I shall almost have the right to say that its nourishment has been derived from me. My lamp could tell you what it has sometimes cost me to supply a single page which might instruct, without repelling you.

Now, this is precisely what the ruminant does. The part he has to perform is to collect in the meadows a sort of food, which would disgust less well-organized stomachs than his own, to work it well up within him, and to give it back in a more palatable and less indigestible form. The little flesh-eaters ( carnivora ) come afterwards to the feast, and the feast is himself!

The whole history, then, of the ruminant is to be read in his stomach. His real office is to digest, and in fact he devotes the best hours of his days to the perfecting of that beneficent labor, on which the life of so many weak stomachs depends. Have you ever amused yourself by watching a large ox lying down in a meadow? Long after he has finished grazing, his jaw continues to work, turning round and round like the grindstone of a painter when he is rubbing down his colors. Look, and you will see that he will remain there for hours together, motionless and contemplative, absorbed in this incomprehensible mastication, rolling about in his throat from time to time some invisible food. Do not laugh at him, however. As you sec him there he is performing his part in life, he is ruminating .

To ruminate is to chew over again what has been already swallowed; and, however droll this may seem to you, it is the business which all ruminants are born to. You remember the monkey's pouch, which serves him as a larder, whence he takes out his provisions as he wants to eat. The ruminant has an immense pouch of the same kind, into which, while he is grazing, he hastily conveys large masses of half-bitten grass. You probably think he is eating when he has his head down in the grass; but you are mistaken. This is only a preparatory work; he is hastily heaping up in his larder the food he intends to eat by-and-by; only his larder, instead of being, like the monkey's, in his cheeks, where, indeed, there would not have been half room enough for those great bundles he tucks in, is in the middle of his body, close to the extremity of the oesophagus, whose lower wall, being slit at that part, becomes an imperfectly secure tube, ready to burst open under pressure, and allow the food to escape between the edges of the slit; these, otherwise, remaining naturally closed. As soon as the large bundles of grass come to this part, they press against the walls of the tube, which they by this means separate, and fall into the provision-pouch, which bears the name of paunch, or grass-pocket, in fact. As soon as the paunch is well filled, and the animal sure of his dinner, he lies down in some quiet corner, where he proceeds gravely with the important act, which is the real object of his existence. A little below the entrance to the paunch, and communicating both with it and the canal of the oesophagus, is a second receptacle, which old French naturalists, not being much acquainted with Greek, named the
cap , on account of its fancied resemblance to the caps worn on the head, and which we call 'king's hood' or 'honey-comb bag.' This second stomach now contracts (at least so it is supposed), and thus retains, as if with a closed fist, a portion of the grass accumulated in the paunch: of this it forms a pellet, which it sends back into the oesophagus, and the oesophagus, by continued contractions from below upwards, returns it to the mouth, where at last the grassy lump is chewed in