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

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To complete the internal work of digestion, so feebly begun in the bill, an extremely large liver pours torrents of bile into the duodenum, and the manufacture of chyle proceeds with that wild rapidity which characterizes all the living actions of birds. But speaking of this liver, I think I ought to give you an account of a celebrated dish, considered a great dainty by epicures, called pâtés de foies gras - fat liver patties , to translate it into its meaning. Very likely you will not care to eat them after hearing my story; but that will be no great loss to you, for it is a very indigestible sort of food, and not at all good for children.

You remember my telling you about Englishmen going to India and coming back with a liver-complaint, from having eaten and drunk more than the climate allowed? By an imitation of this process, human ingenuity-occasionally so cruel-has created the pâtés de foies gras , the glory of Strasburg. I have been in the country, and can tell you how it is managed. They shut a goose up in a square box, where there is just room for his body. They open his bill at feeding-time, and cram down with the finger as much food as can be got in. This is throttling rather than feeding it. The poor beast, who can use no resistance, since it cannot move, and who is kept in the dark to prevent excitement; the poor beast is quite unable to burn all the mass of combustibles with which the blood soon finds itself loaded. This carries them to the liver to be turned into bile; but the liver is not equal to the work, becomes loaded in its turn by unemployed materials, and grows and grows, till at last, having filled up all the space around it, it stops the play of the heart and lungs. When the animal is nearly suffocated they kill it; and this is how we come to have pâtés de foies gras to eat! If they give us a fit of indigestion afterwards, it is a vengeance we richly deserve. At Toulouse, where the same trade is carried on on a large scale, they used formerly to go even beyond this. They fastened the goose by the feet before the fire-place, after having put out its eyes. The imitation of the Englishman's proceeding was still more perfect here, for the fire acted the part of the Indian sun to perfection. I do not know that part of the country well enough to tell you whether they have quite given up this piece of wicked ingenuity; all I can say is, I devoutly hope so.

The intestine of birds is much shorter than that of mammals. Here everything is done at full gallop, and the chyle has not to go far before it is absorbed. I have before me a book, in which I am told that the wagtails eaten in France can be fattened in twenty-four hours, if you only know how to set about it, and these birds are not rare; they belong to the same family as the red-breasts, the tomtits, and the nightingale. Thrushes and wheatears (ortolans) require, for the same purpose, four or five days in the same country, left to themselves to roam about, when the vine keeps open table for them.

This incredible quickness, not only in digesting, but, what is much more, in transforming food into fresh living material ( assimilating it, as it is called), has often a fatal result for the bird. He is prohibited from fasting; his life is a fire of straw, which must be replenished unceasingly, or it will die out in the twinkling of an eye. Our own little birds-children-eat oftener than grown-up people, and if by any accident they are kept waiting awhile, they soon cry out with hunger. You know this, do you not? Well, then, if any one should give you a bird to keep in a cage, remember that you have undertaken a great responsibility, and that it will not do to be careless with him. To neglect feeding him for one day is to run the risk of finding him starved to death next morning. With this warning, I will conclude my chapter on birds. I hope I have not spoken in vain in behalf of those poor little captive songsters, whose fragile lives are at the mercy of their young masters and mistresses.


LETTER XXXV.

REPTILIA. ( Reptiles .)

Passing from birds to reptiles is like falling from a torrent into still water. Life drags on as sluggishly with the second as it dashes furiously forward with the first.

I spoke to you just now about a fire of straw: now we have a fire such as Frenchwomen make in their chaufferettes , or foot-stoves. A handful of charcoal-dust, and a few live embers between two layers of ashes, is enough for the whole day; which is economical, is it not? but then it throws out only just warmth enough to keep one's feet comfortable. And so it is with reptiles. They live at very small expense. If you feed them once a month they will not complain, for so slow a fire does not often need replenishing with combustibles. It is even said that the experiment has been carried so far with tortoises that they have been made to fast for more than a year, and still the charcoal fire kept up its languid pace. Of course, on the other hand, there is not nearly so much oxygen consumed at once upon such a diet as this. Where a bird would perish twenty times over in five minutes for want of oxygen, a lizard can remain whole hours with impunity. Moreover, the animal heat of reptiles is in proportion to their expenditure of it. Graceful as is the snake (that living jewel so often copied by bracelet-makers), you feel on touching it an instinctive horror, caused by the thrill of cold it produces. All the animals we have considered hitherto have warm blood, and bear within themselves the source of their heat, which is pretty nearly always the same. But reptiles are cold-blooded, and heat comes to them chiefly from without.

If, at the end of a cold winter, we go to some favorable corner to catch the first rays of spring sunshine, we feel ourselves almost re-born, as it were, as if a new life had come into us with the sunbeams. Look at the little lizard you see frisking on the white stones of the wall; upon him decidedly the sun is darting actual life from its rays. While the cold lasted he staid squatting in his hiding-place-not asleep, but annihilated-congealed, so to speak, like water caught by the frost; no longer digesting, and hardly breathing, he had ceased to live in reality: and it is no imaginary regeneration which the return of warmth brings to him. Like those helpless people who have not the power to carve out their own destinies, reptiles have within them only an insufficient source of animation; their life is at the mercy of the sun, and is high or low, according as that rises or sets in the heavens. At Martinique, where at noonday it darts its devouring rays perpendicularly upon the cane-fields, and every one flies into the shade to escape its scorching heat, the rattlesnake traverses the country, monarch of all he surveys; he strikes rapidly with a vigorous tail upon the calcined ground; and woe then to any one who receives his bite! All the fire of the atmosphere has passed into his frame. Now go to the Zoological Gardens, and see him there: he crawls languidly under the coverings that shelter him; if by chance he bites any one, it is with an idle tooth that no longer knows how to kill; his life was left behind with the sun of the tropics, and it is little more than a corpse that you are looking at.

And so among ourselves, my dear child: we meet with people whose whole power comes from without, who are brilliant and haughty in the sunshine of good fortune, but crest-fallen, cowardly, and cringing in the cold days of adversity. Nevertheless, they are constituted originally like other people: they are neither greater fools as a general rule, nor less gifted than their neighbors; where they fail is in the heart, but that is enough to spoil everything. And so with reptiles: the heart is their weak point also. Like us, they have lungs into which the air pours without any difficulty, and a heart to send the blood to them; so it seems at first sight as if there could be nothing to prevent their resisting the changes of external temperature just as well as ourselves. There is only one small trifle wanting, and that is a partition in the middle of the heart; but this one defect is enough to disorder the whole machinery.

You know that, with us, the heart is divided into two compartments: the right ventricle, which receives the venous blood from the organs and sends it to the lungs; the left ventricle, which receives it (now become arterial) from the lungs and returns it to the organs. Hence the double system of veins and arteries, the one going from the heart to the lungs, the other from the heart to the organs. All this is found the same in reptiles: except that the partition, which separates our two ventricles from each other, does not exist in them; and the heart has only one common room, in which, therefore, arterial and venous blood become mixed together. It follows from this that, at each contraction of the heart, it is a mixture of arterial and venous blood which is sent in the two opposite directions at the same time, and that the organs receive some which has been used before, while the lungs have some returned to them which has been regenerated already. Now, on the one hand, this mixed blood can only keep up an imperfect combustion in the body (like the live embers between two layers of ashes that we spoke of lately), and, on the other hand, the air in the lungs can only act upon a part of the blood it meets with there, the rest having already undergone the regenerating process. And this accounts for both the feeble animal heat and the small consumption of oxygen in reptiles.

Added to which the lungs of a reptile are coarsely constructed, and composed of cells enormous in comparison with ours, so that the blood does not find nearly as many little chambers to rush into for a taste of air as with us. Moreover, you must understand that there is no such thing as a diaphragm here: the lungs float loosely in the form of elongated bags in the one only cavity of the body, and the slight movement of the ribs does not allow them to dilate sufficiently to take in much air at a time.

All these things, taken together, make the reptile a very poor stove, and render him incapable of any prolonged exertion. The serpent darts like an arrow upon his prey; but he could not pursue it for half a mile without stopping, not even over the burning soil of the equator. The lizard is very nimble, is it not? and the quickness of its movements rather reminds one of the agility of a bird. But watch it, and you will see it only moves in jerks, and keeps stopping every minute; it cannot escape you if there is no hole near into which it can disappear. In France there is a large green lizard that runs among the