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The history of a mouthful of bread

by Jean Macé · English · Gutenberg #6970 · 673,548 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The history of a mouthful of bread
        and its effect on the organization of men and animals

Author: Jean Macé

Translator: Mrs. Alfred Gatty


        
Release date: November 1, 2004 [eBook #6970]
                Most recently updated: September 3, 2012

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6970

Credits: Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HISTORY OF A MOUTHFUL OF BREAD ***




Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Charles Franks and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team.










THE HISTORY OF A MOUTHFUL OF BREAD:
And Its Effect on the Organization of Men and Animals.

BY JEAN MACÉ.

Translated Prom the Eighth French Edition, By Mrs. Alfred Gatty.




EXTRACTS FROM THE PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION.

The volume of which the following pages are a translation, has been
adopted by the _University Commission at Paris_ among their prize
books, and has reached an eighth edition. Perhaps these facts speak
sufficiently in its favor; but as translator, and to some extent editor,
I wish to add my testimony to the great charm as well as merit of the
little work. I sat down to it, I must own, with no special predilection
in favor of the subject as a suitable one for young people; but in the
course of the labor have become a thorough convert to the author's
views that such a study--perhaps I ought to add, so pursued as he has
enabled it to be--is likely to prove a most useful and most desirable
one.

The precise age at which the interest of a young mind can be turned
towards this practical branch of natural history is an open question,
and not worth disputing about. It may vary even in different
individuals. The letters are addressed to a _child_--in the original
even to a _little girl_--and most undoubtedly, as the book stands, it is
fit for any child's perusal who can find amusement in its pages: while
to the rather older readers, of whom I trust there will be a great many,
I will venture to say that the advantage they will gain in the subject
having been so treated as to be brought within the comprehension and
adapted to the tastes of a child, is pretty nearly incalculable. The
quaintness and drollery of the illustrations with which difficult
scientific facts are set forth will provoke many a smile, no doubt, and
in some young people perhaps a tendency to feel themselves treated
_babyishly_; but if in the course of the babyish treatment they find
themselves almost unexpectedly becoming masters of an amount of valuable
information on very difficult subjects, they will have nothing to
complain of. Let such young readers refer to even a popular
Encyclopaedia for an insight into any of the subjects of the
twenty-eight chapters of this volume--"The Heart," "The Lungs," "The
Stomach," "Atmospheric Pressure,"--no matter which, and see how much
they can understand of it without an amount of preliminary instruction
which would require half-a-year's study, and they will then thoroughly
appreciate the quite marvellous ingenuity and beautiful skill with
which M. Macé has brought the great leading anatomical and physical
facts of life out of the depths of scientific learning, and made them
literally comprehensible by a child.

       *       *       *       *       *

There is one point (independent of the scientific teaching) and that,
happily, the only really important one, in which the English translator
has had no change to make or desire. The religious teaching of the
book is unexceptionable. There is no strained introduction of the
subject, but there is throughout the volume an acknowledgment of the
Great Creator of this marvellous work of the human frame, of the daily
and hourly gratitude we owe to Him, and of the utter impossibility of
our tracing out half his wonders, even in the things nearest to our
senses, and most constantly subject to observation. M. Macé will help,
and not hinder the humility with which the Christian naturalist lifts
one veil only to recognise another beyond.

It will be satisfactory to any one who may be inclined to wonder how
a lady can feel sure of having correctly translated the various
scientific and anatomical statements contained in the volume, to know
that the whole has been submitted to the careful revision of a medical
friend, to whom I have reason to be very grateful for valuable
explanations and corrections whenever they were necessary. In the same
way the chapter on "Atmospheric Pressure," where, owing to the
difference between French and English weights and measures, several
alterations of illustrations, etc., had to be made, has received similar
kind offices from the hands of a competent mathematician.

       *       *       *       *       *

MARGARET GATTY.

Ecclesfield, June, 1864.




NOTE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION.

In May '66, the seventeenth edition of this work was on sale in Paris.
The date of Mrs. Gatty's preface, it will be observed, is June '64,
and at that time, the eighth French edition only had been reached.
That it should be a popular book and command large sale wherever it
is known, will not surprise any one who reads it: the only remarkable
circumstance about it is, that it should not have been republished
here long ere this. Even this may probably be accounted for, on the
supposition that the title under which the translation was published
in England, was so unmeaning--conveying not the slightest idea of the
contents of the book--that none of our publishers even ventured to
hand it over to their "readers" to examine.

The author's title, _The History of a Mouthful of Bread_, while
falling far short of giving a clear notion of the entire scope of the
work, is shockingly diluted and meaningless, when translated _The
History of a Bit of Bread!_

To the translation of Mrs. Gatty, which is in the main an excellent
one, for she has generally seized upon the idea of the author and
rendered it with singular felicity, it may be very properly objected
that she has taken some liberties with the text when there was any
conflict of opinion between herself and her author, and has given her
own ideas instead of his, which is, probably, what she refers to when
she calls herself "to some extent editor."

The reader of this edition will, in all these cases, find the thought
of the author and not that of his translator; for the reason that a
careful examination of the original has convinced the publisher that
in every instance the author was to be preferred to the translator,
to say nothing of the right an author may have to be faithfully
translated.

Besides making these restorations, the copy from which this edition
was printed has been carefully compared with the last edition of the
author and a vast number of corrections made, and in its present shape
it is respectfully submitted and dedicated to every one (whose name
is legion, of course) who numbers among his young friends a "_my
dear child_" to present it to.





CONTENTS.

I.--INTRODUCTION

FIRST PART MAN.

II.--THE HAND
III.--THE TONGUE
IV.--THE TEETH
V.--THE TEETH (_continued_)
VI.--THE TEETH (_continued_)
VII.--THE THROAT
VIII.--THE STOMACH
IX.--THE STOMACH (_continued_)
X.--THE INTESTINAL CANAL
XI.--THE LIVER
XII.--THE CHYLE
XIII.--THE HEART
XIV.--THE ARTERIES
XV.--THE NOURISHMENT OF THE ORGANS
XVI.--THE ORGANS
XVII.--ARTERIAL AND VENOUS BLOOD
XVIII.--ATMOSPHERIC PRESSURE
XIX.--THE ACTION OF THE LUNGS
XX.--CARBON AND OXYGEN
XXI.--COMBUSTION
XXII.--ANIMAL HEAT
XXIII.--ACTION OF THE BLOOD UPON THE ORGANS
XXIV.--THE WORK OF THE ORGANS
XXV.--CARBONIC ACID
XXVI.--ALIMENTS OF COMBUSTION
XXVII.--ALIMENTS OF NUTRITION (_continued_)--NITROGEN OR AZOTE
XXVIII.--COMPOSITION OF THE BLOOD


SECOND PART.

ANIMALS.

XXIX.--CLASSIFICATION OF ANIMALS
XXX.--MAMMALIA (_Mammals_)
XXXI.--MAMMALIA. (_Mammals_)--_continued_
XXXII.--MAMMALIA--_continued_
XXXIII.--MAMMALIA--_continued_
XXXIV.--AVES. (_Birds_)
XXXV.--REPTILIA. (_Reptiles_)
XXXVI.--PISCES. (_Fishes_)
XXXVII.--INSECTA. (_Insects_)
XXXVIII.--CRUSTACEA--MOLLUSKA. (_Crustaceans and Mollusks_)
XXXIX.--VERMES--ZOOPHYTA. (_Worms and Zoophytes_)
XL.--THE NOURISHMENT OF PLANTS
CONCLUSION



I.

INTRODUCTION.

I am going to tell you, my dear child, something of the life and nature
of men and animals, believing the information may be of use to you in
after-life, besides being an amusement to you now.

Of course, I shall have to explain to you a great many particulars
which are generally considered very difficult to understand, and which
are not always taught even to grown-up people. But if we work together,
and between us succeed in getting them clearly into your head, it will
be a great triumph to me, and you will find out that the science of
learned men is more entertaining for little girls, as well as more
comprehensible, than it is sometimes supposed to be. Moreover, you
will be in advance of your years, as it were, and one day may be
astonished to find that you had mastered in childhood, almost as a
mere amusement, some of the first principles of anatomy, chemistry,
and several other of the physical sciences, as well as having attained
to some knowledge of natural history generally.

I begin at once, then, with the _History of a Mouthful of Bread_,
although I am aware you may be tempted to exclaim, that if I am going
to talk only about that, I may save myself the trouble. You know all
about it, you say, as well as I do, and need not surely be told how
to chew a bit of bread-and-butter! Well, but you must let me begin at
the very beginning with you, and you have no notion what an incredible
number of facts will be found to be connected with this chewing of a
piece of bread. A big book might be written about them, were all the
details to be entered into.

First and foremost--Have you ever asked yourself _why_ people eat?

You laugh at such a ridiculous question.

"Why do people eat? Why, because there are bonbons, and cakes, and
gingerbread, and sweetmeats, and fruit, and all manner of things good
to eat." Very well, that is a very good reason, no doubt, and you may
think that no other is wanted. If there were nothing but soup in the
world, indeed, the case would be different. There might be some excuse
then for making the inquiry.

Now, then, let us suppose for once that there _is_ nothing in the
world to eat but soup; and it is true that there are plenty of poor
little children for whom there is nothing else, but who go on eating
nevertheless, and with a very good appetite, too, I assure you, as
their parents know but too well very often. Why do people eat, then,
even when they have nothing to eat but soup? This is what I am going
to tell you, if you do not already know.

The other day, when your mamma said that your frock "had grown" too
short, and that you could not go out visiting till we had given you
another with longer sleeves and waist, what was the real cause of this
necessity?

What a droll question, you say, and you answer--"Because I had grown,
of course."

To which I say "of course," too; for undoubtedly it was you who had
outgrown your frock. But then I must push the question further, and
ask--How had you grown?

Now you are puzzled. Nobody had been to your bed and pulled out your
arms or your legs as you lay asleep. Nobody had pieced a bit on at the
elbow or the knee, as people slip in a new leaf to a table when there
is going to be a larger party than usual at dinner. How was it, then,
that the sleeves no longer came down to your wrists, or that the body
only reached your knees? Nothing grows larger without being added to,
any more than anything gets smaller without having lost something; you
may lay that down as a rule, once for all. If, therefore, nothing was
added to you from without, something must have been added to you from
within. Some sly goblin, as it were, must have been cramming into your
frame whatever increase it has made in arms, legs, or anything else.
And who, do you think, this sly goblin is?

Why, my dear, it is _yourself!_

Ay! Bethink you, now, of all the bread-and-butter, and bonbons, and
gingerbread, and cakes, and sweetmeats, and even soup and plain food
(the soup and plain food being the most useful of all) which you have
been sending, day by day, for some time past, down what we used to
call "the red lane," into the little gulf below. What do you think
became of them when they got there? Well, they set to work at once,
without asking your leave, to transform themselves into something else;
and gliding cunningly into all the holes and corners of your body,
became there, each as best he might, bones, flesh, blood, etc.,
etc. Touch yourself where you will, it is upon these things you lay
your hand, though, of course, without recognizing them, for the
transformation is perfect and complete. And it is the same with
everybody.

Look at your little pink nails, which push out further and further
every morning; examine the tips of your beautiful fair hair, which
gets longer and longer by degrees; coming out from your head as grass
springs up from the earth; feel the firm corners of your second teeth,
which are gradually succeeding those which came to you in infancy; you
have _eaten_ all these things, and that no long time ago.

Nor are you children the only creatures who are busy in this way. There
is your kitten, for instance, who a few months ago was only a tiny bit
of fur, but is now turning gradually into a grown-up cat. It is her
daily food which is daily becoming a cat inside her--her saucers of
milk now, and very soon her mice, all serve to the same end.

The large ox, too, of whom you are so much afraid, because you cannot
as yet be persuaded what a good-natured beast he really is, and how
unlikely to do any harm to children who do none to him--that large ox
began life as a small calf, and it is the grass which he has been
eating for some time past which has transformed him into the huge mass
of flesh you now see, and which by-and-by will be eaten by man, to
become man's flesh in the same manner.

But, further, still: Even the forest trees, which grow so high and
spread so wide, were at first no bigger than your little finger, and
all the grandeur and size you now look upon, they have taken in by the
process of eating. "What, _do trees eat?_" you ask.

Verily, do they; and they are, by no means, the least greedy of eaters,
for they eat day and night without ceasing. Not, as you may suppose,
that they crunch bonbons, or anything else as you do; nor is the process
with them precisely the same as with you. Yet you will be surprised
hereafter, I assure you, to find how many points of resemblance exist
between them and us in this matter. But we will speak further of this
presently.

Now, I think you must allow that there are few fairytales more
marvellous than this history of bread and meat turning into little
boys and girls, milk and mice turning into cats, and grass into oxen!
And I call it a _history_, observe, because it is a transformation
that never happens suddenly, but by degrees, as time goes on.

Now, then, for the explanation. You have heard, I dare say, of those
wonderful spinning-machines which take in at one end a mass of raw
cotton, very like what you see in wadding, and give out at the other
a roll of fine calico, all folded and packed up ready to be delivered
to the tradespeople. Well, you have within you, a machine even more
ingenious than that, which receives from you all the bread-and-butter
and other sorts of food you choose to put into it, and returns it to
you changed into the nails, hair, bones and flesh we have been talking
about, and many other things besides; for there are quantities of
things in your body, all different from each other, which you are
manufacturing in this manner all day long, without knowing anything
about it. And a very fortunate thing this is for you: for I do not
know what would become of you if you had to be thinking from morning
to night of all that requires to be done in your body, as your mother
has to look after and remember all that has to be done in the house.
Just think what a relief it would be to her to possess a machine which
should sweep the rooms, cook the dinners, wash the plates, mend torn
clothes, and keep watch over everything without giving her any trouble;
and, moreover, make no more noise or fuss than yours does, which has
been working away ever since you were born without your ever troubling
your head about it, or probably even knowing of its existence! Just
think of this and be thankful.

But do not fancy you are the only possessor of a magical machine of
this sort. Your kitten has one also, and the ox we were speaking of,
and all other living creatures. And theirs render the same service to
them that yours does to you, and much in the same way; for all these
machines are made after one model, though with certain variations
adapted to the differences in each animal. And, as you will see
by-and-by, these variations exactly correspond with the different sort
of work that has to be done in each particular case. For instance,
where the machine has grass to act upon, as in the ox, it is differently
constructed from that in the cat which has to deal with meat and mice.
In the same way in our manufactories, though all the spinning-machines
are made upon one model, there is one particular arrangement for those
which spin cotton, another for those which spin wool, another for flax,
and so on.

But, further:

You have possibly noticed already, without being told, that all animals
are not of equal value; or, at least, to use a better expression, they
have not all had the same advantages bestowed on them. The dog, for
instance, that loving and intelligent companion, who almost reads your
thoughts in your eyes, and is as affectionate and obedient to his master
as it were to be wished all children were to their parents--this dog
is, as you must own, very superior, in all ways, to the frog, with its
large goggle eyes and clammy body, hiding itself in the water as soon
as you come near it. But again, the frog, which can come and go as it
likes, is decidedly superior to the oyster, which has neither head nor
limbs, and lives all alone, glued into a shell, in a sort of perpetual
imprisonment.

Now the machine I have been telling you about is found in the oyster
and in the frog as well as in the dog, only it is less complicated,
and therefore less perfect in the oyster than in the frog; and less
perfect again in the frog than in the dog; for as we descend in the
scale of animals we find it becoming less and less elaborate--losing
here one of its parts, there another, but nevertheless remaining still
the same machine to all intents and purposes; though by the time it
has reached its lowest condition of structure we should hardly be able
to recognize it again, if we had not watched it through all its
gradations of form, and escorted it, as it were, from stage to stage.

Let me make this clear to you by a comparison.

You know the lamp which is lit every evening on the drawing-room table,
and around which you all assemble to work or read. Take off first the
shade, which throws the light on your book--then the glass which
prevents it smoking--then the little chimney which holds the wick and
drives the air into the flame to make it burn brightly. Then take away
the screw, which sends the wick up and down; undo the pieces one by
one, until none remain but those absolutely necessary to having a light
at all--namely, the receptacle for the oil and the floating wick which
consumes it.

Now if any one should come in and hear you say, "Look at my lamp,"
what would he reply? He would most likely ask at once, "What lamp?"--for
there would be very little resemblance to a lamp in that mere ghost
of one before him.

But to you, who have seen the different parts removed one after another,
that wick soaked in oil (let your friend shake his head about it as
he pleases) will still be the lamp to you, however divested of much
that made it once so perfect, and however dimly it may shine in
consequence.

And this is exactly what happens when the machine we are discussing
is examined in the different grades of animals. The ignoramus who has
not followed it through its changes and reductions cannot recognize
it when it is presented to him in its lowest condition; but any one
who has carefully observed it throughout, knows that it is, in point
of fact, the same machine still.

This, then, is what we are now going to look at together, my dear
little girl. We will study first, piece by piece, the exquisite machine
within ourselves, which is of such unceasing use to us as long as we
do not give it more than a proper share of work to perform. Do you
understand? We will see what becomes of the mouthful of bread which
you place so coolly between your teeth, as if when that was done nothing
further remained to be thought about. We will trace it in its passage
through every part of the machine, from beginning to end. It will
therefore be simply only the _History of a Mouthful of Bread_ I
am telling you, even while I seem to be talking of other matters; for
to make that comprehensible I shall have to enter into a good many
explanations.

And when you have thoroughly got to understand the history of what you
eat yourself, we will look a little into the history of what other
animals eat, beginning by those most like ourselves, and going on to
the rest in regular succession downwards. And while we are on the
subject, I will say a word or two on the way in which vegetables eat,
for, as you remember, I have stated that they do eat also.

Do you think this is likely to interest you, and be worth the trouble
of some thought and attention?

Perhaps you may tell me it sounds very tedious, and like making a great
fuss about a trifle; that you have all your life eaten mouthfuls of
bread without troubling yourself as to what became of them, and yet
have not been stopped growing by your ignorance, any more than the
little cat, who knows no more how it happens than you do.

True, my dear; but the cat is only a little cat, and you are a little
girl. Up to the present moment you and she have known, one as much as
the other on this subject, and on that point you have therefore had
no superiority over her. But she will never trouble herself about it,
and will always remain a little cat. You, on the contrary, are intended
by God to become something more in intelligence than you are now, and
it is by learning more than the cat that you will rise above her in
this respect. To learn, is the duty of all men, not only for the
pleasure of curiosity and the vanity of being called learned, but
because in proportion to what we learn we approach nearer to the destiny
which God has appointed to man, and when we walk obediently in the
path which God himself has marked out for us, we necessarily become
better.

It is sometimes said to grown-up people, that it is never too late to
learn. To children one may say that it is never too early to learn.
And among the things which they may learn, those which I want now to
teach you have the double merit of being, in the first place amusing,
and afterwards, and above all, calculated to accustom you to think of
God, by causing you to observe the wonders which He has done. Sure am
I that when you know them you will not fail to admire them; moreover
I promise your mother that you will be all the better, as well as
wiser, for the study.




FIRST PART.--MAN.

LETTER II.

THE HAND.

At the foot of the mountains, from whence I write to you, my dear
child, when we want to show the country to a stranger, we commence by
making him climb one of the heights, whence he may take in at a glance
the whole landscape below, all the woods and villages scattered over
the plain, even up to the blue line of the Rhine, which stretches out
to the distant horizon. After this he will easily find his way about.

It is to the top of a mountain equally useful that I have just led
you. It has cost you some trouble to climb with me. You have had to
keep your eyes very wide open that you might see to the end of the
road we had to go together. Now then, let us come down and view the
country in detail. Then we shall go as if we were on wheels.

And now let us begin at the beginning:

Well, doubtless, as the subject is eating, you will expect me to begin
with the mouth.

Wait a moment; there is something else first. But you are so accustomed
to make use of it, that you have never given it a thought, I dare say.

It is not enough merely that one should have a mouth; we must be able
to put what we want within it. What would you do at dinner, for
instance, if you had no hands?

The hand is then the first thing to be considered.

I shall not give you a description of it; you know what it is like.
But what, perhaps, you do not know, because you have never thought
about it, is, the reason why your hand is a more convenient, and
consequently more perfect, instrument than a cat's paw, for instance,
which yet answers a similar purpose, for it helps the cat to catch
mice.

Among your five fingers there is one which is called the thumb, which
stands out on one side quite apart from the others. Look at it with
respect; it is to these two little bones, covered over with a little
flesh, that man owes part of his physical superiority to other animals.
It is one of his best servants, one of the noblest of God's gifts to
him. Without the thumb three-fourths (at least) of human arts would
yet have to be invented; and to begin with, the art not only of carrying
the contents of one's plate to one's mouth, but of filling the plate
(a very important question in another way) would, but for the thumb,
have had difficulties to surmount of which you can form no idea.

Have you noticed that when you want to take hold of anything (a piece
of bread, we will say, as we are on the subject of eating), have you
noticed that it is always the thumb who puts himself forward, and that
he is always on one side by himself, whilst the rest of the fingers
are on the other? If the thumb is not helping, nothing remains in your
hand, and you don't know what to do with it. Try, by way of experiment,
to carry your spoon to your mouth without putting your thumb to it,
and you will see what a long time it will take you to get through a
poor little plateful of broth. The thumb is placed in such a manner
on your hand that it can face each of the other fingers one after
another, or all together, as you please; and by this we are enabled
to grasp, as if with a pair of pincers, whatever object, whether large
or small. Our hands owe their perfection of usefulness to this happy
arrangement, which has been bestowed on no other animal, except the
monkey, our nearest neighbor.

I may even add, while we are about it, that it is this which
distinguishes the hand from a paw or a foot. Our feet, which have other
things to do than to pick up apples or lay hold of a fork, our feet
have also each five fingers, but the largest cannot face the others;
it is not a thumb, therefore, and it is because of this that our feet
are not hands. Now the monkey has thumbs on the four members
corresponding to our arms and legs, and thus we may say that he has
hands at the end of his legs as well as of his arms. Nevertheless, he
is not on that account better off than we are, but quite the contrary.
I will explain this to you presently.

To return to our subject. You see that it was necessary, before saying
anything about the mouth, to consider the hand, which is the mouth's
purveyor. Before the cook lights the fires the maid must go to market,
must she not? And it is a very valuable maid that we have here: what
would become of us without her?

If we were in the habit of giving thought to everything, we should
never even gather a nut without being grateful to the Providence which
has provided us with the thumb, by means of which we are able to do
it so easily.

But however well I may have expressed it, I am by no means sure, after
all, that I have succeeded in showing you clearly, how absolutely
necessary our hand is to us in eating, and why it has the honor to
stand at the beginning of the history of what we eat.

It still appears to you, I suspect, that even if you were to lose the
use of your hands you would not, for all that, let yourself die of
hunger.

This is because you have not attended to another circumstance, which
nevertheless demands your notice--namely, that from one end of the
world to the other, quantities of hands are being employed in providing
you with the wherewithal to eat.

To go on further: Have you any idea how many hands have been put in
motion merely to enable you to have your coffee and roll in the morning?
What a number, to be sure, over this cup of coffee (which is a trifle
in comparison with the other food you will consume in the course of
the day); from the hand of the negro who gathered the coffee crop to
that of the cook who ground the berries, to say nothing of the hand
of the sailor who guided the ship which bore them to our shores. Again,
from the hand of the laborer who sowed the corn, and that of the miller
who ground it into flour, to the hand of the baker who made it into
a roll. Then the hand of the farmer's wife who milked the cow, and the
hand of the refiner who made the sugar; to say nothing of the many
others who prepared his work for him, and I know not how many more.

How would it be, then, if I were to amuse myself by counting up all
the hands that are wanted to furnish--

    The sugar-refiner's manufactory,
    The milkmaid's shed,
    The baker's oven,
    The miller's mill,
    The laborer's plough,
    The sailor's ship?

And even now is there nothing we have forgotten? Ah, yes! the most
important of all the hands to you;--the hand which brings together
for your benefit the fruits of the labor of all the others--the hand
of your dear mother, always active, always ready, that hand which so
often acts as yours when your own is awkward or idle.

Now, then, you see how you might really manage to do without those two
comparatively helpless little paws of yours (although there is a thumb
to each), without suffering too much for want of food. With such an
army of hands at work, in every way, to furnish provision for that
little mouth, there would not be much danger.


But cut off your cat's fore paws--oh dear! what am I saying? Suppose,
rather, that she has not got any, and then count how many mice she
will catch in a day. The milk you give her is another matter, remember.
Like your cup of coffee, that is provided for her by others.

Believe me, if you were suddenly left all alone in a wood, like those
pretty squirrels who nibble hazel-nuts so daintily, you would soon
discover, from being thus thrown upon your own resources, that the
mouth is not the only thing required for eating, and that whether it
be a paw or a hand, there must always be a servant to go to market for
Mr. Mouth, and to provide him with food.

Happily, we are not driven to this extremity. We take hold of our
coffee-biscuit between the thumb and forefinger, and behold it is on
its road--Open the mouth, and it is soon done!

But before we begin to chew, let us stop to consider a little.

The mouth is the door at which everything enters. Now, to every
well-kept door there is a doorkeeper, or porter. And what is the office
of a well-instructed porter? Well, he asks the people that present
themselves, who they are, and what they have come for; and if he does
not like their appearance, he refuses them admittance. We too, then,
to be complete, need a porter of this sort in our mouths, and I am
happy to say we have one accordingly. I wonder whether you know him?
You look at me quite aghast! Oh, ungrateful child, not to know your
dearest friend! As a punishment, I shall not tell you who he is to-day.
I will give you till to-morrow to think about it.

Meanwhile, as I have a little time left, I will say one word more about
what we are going to look at together. It would hardly be worth while
to tell you this pretty story which we have begun, if from time to
time we were not to extract a moral from it. And what is the moral of
our history to-day?

It has more than one.

In the first place it teaches you, if you never knew it before, that
you are under great obligations to other people, indeed to almost
everybody, and most of all perhaps to people whom you may be tempted
to look down upon. This laborer, with his coarse smock-frock and heavy
shoes, whom you are so ready to ridicule, is the very person who, with
his rough hand, has been the means of procuring for you half the good
things you eat. That workman, with turned-up sleeves, whose dirty black
fingers you are afraid of touching, has very likely blackened and
dirtied them in your service. You owe great respect to all these people,
I assure you, for they all work for you. Do not, then, go and fancy
yourself of great consequence among them--you who are of no use in any
way at present, who want everybody's help yourself, but as yet can
help nobody.

Not that I mean to reproach you by saying this. Your turn has not come
yet, and everybody began like you originally. But I do wish to impress
upon you that you must prepare yourself to become some day useful to
others, so that you may pay back the debts which you are now
contracting.

Every time you look at your little hand, remember that you have its
education to accomplish, its debts of honor to repay, and that you
must make haste and teach it to be very clever, so that it may no
longer be said of you, that you are of no use to anybody.

And then, my dear child, remember that a day will come, when the revered
hands that now take care of your childhood--those hands which to-day
are yours, as it were--will become weak and incapacitated by age. You
will be strong, then, probably, and the assistance which you receive
now, you must then render to her, render it to her as you have received
it--that is to say, with your hands. It is the mother's hand which
comes and goes without ceasing about her little girl now. It is the
daughter's hand which should come and go around the old mother
hereafter--her hand and not another's.

Here again, my child, the mouth is nothing without the hand. The mouth
says, "I love," the hand proves it.



LETTER III.

THE TONGUE.

Now, about this doorkeeper, or porter, as we will call him, of the
mouth. I do not suppose you have guessed who he is; so I am going to
tell you.

The porter who keeps the door of the mouth is _the sense of taste_.

It is he who does the honors of the house so agreeably to proper
visitors, and gives such an unscrupulous dismissal to unpleasant
intruders. In other words, it is by his directions that we welcome so
affectionately with tongue and lips whatever is good to eat, and spit
out unhesitatingly whatever is unpleasant.

I could speak very ill of this porter if I chose; which would not be
very pleasant for certain little gourmands that I see here, who think
a good deal too much of him. But I would rather begin by praising him.
I can make my exceptions afterwards.

In the history I am going to give you, my dear child, there is one
thing you must never lose sight of, even when I do not allude to it;
and that is, that everything we shall examine into, has been expressly
arranged by God for the good and accommodation of our being in this
world; just as a cradle is arranged by a mother for the comfort of her
baby. We must look upon all these things, therefore, as so many
presentsfrom the Almighty himself; and abstain from speaking ill of
them, were it only out of respect for the hand which has bestowed them.

Moreover, there is a very easy plan by which we may satisfy ourselves
of the usefulness and propriety of these gifts--namely, by considering
what would become of us if we were deprived of any one of them.

Suppose, for instance, that you were totally deficient in the sense
of taste, and that when you put a piece of cake into your mouth, it
should create no more sensation in you than when you held it in your
hand?

You would not have thought of imagining such a case yourself, I am
aware; for it never comes into a child's head to think that things can
be otherwise than as God has made them. And in that respect children
are sometimes wiser than philosophers. Nevertheless, we will suppose
this for once, and consider what would happen in consequence.

Well, in the first place, you would eat old mouldy cake with just the
same relish as if it were fresh; and this mouldy cake, which now you
carefully avoid because it is mouldy, is very unwholesome food, and
would poison you were you to eat a great deal of it.

I give this merely as an instance, but it is one of a thousand. And
although, with regard to eatables, you only know such as have been
prepared either in shops or in your mamma's kitchen, still you must
be aware there are many we ought to avoid, because they would do no
good in our stomachs, and that we should often be puzzled to distinguish
these from others, if the sense of taste did not warn us about them.
You must admit, therefore, that such warnings are not without their
value.

In short, it is a marvellous fact that what is unfit for food, is
_almost always_ to be recognized as it enters the mouth, by its
disagreeable taste; a further proof that God has thought of everything.
Medicines, it is true, are unpleasant to the taste, and yet have to
be swallowed in certain cases. But we may compare them to
chimney-sweepers, who are neither pretty to look at, nor invited into
the drawing-room; but who, nevertheless, are from time to time let
into the grandest houses by the porters--though possibly with a
grimace--because their services are wanted. And in the same way
medicines have to be admitted sometimes--despite their
unpleasantness--because they, too, have to work in the chimney. Taste
does not deceive you about them, however; they are not intended to
serve as food. If any one should try to breakfast, dine, and sup upon
physic he would soon find this out.

Besides, I only said _almost_ always, in speaking of unwholesome
food making itself known to us by its nasty taste; for it is an
unfortunate truth that men have invented a thousand plans for baffling
their natural guardian, and for bringing thieves secretly into the
company of honest people. They sometimes put poison, for instance,
into sugar--as is too often done in the case of those horrible green
and blue sugar plums, against which I have an old grudge, for they
poisoned a friend whom I loved dearly in my youth. Such things as these
pass imprudently by the porter, who sees nothing of their real
character--Mr. Sugar concealing the rogues behind him.

Moreover, we are sometimes so foolish as not to leave the porter time
to make his examination. We swallow one thing after another greedily,
without tasting; and such a crowd of arrivals, coming in with a rush,
"forces the sentry," as they say; and whose fault is it, if, after
this, we find thieves established in the house?

But animals have more sense than we have.

Look at your kitten when you give her some tit-bit she is not acquainted
with--how cautiously and gently she puts out her nose, so as to give
herself time for consideration. Then how delicately she touches the
unknown object with the tip of her tongue, once, twice, and perhaps
three times. And when the tip of the tongue has thus gone forward
several times to make observations (for this is the great post of
observation for the cat's porter as well as for ours), she ventures
to decide upon swallowing, but not before. If she has the least
suspicion, no amount of coaxing makes any difference to her; you may
call "puss, puss," for ever; all your tender invitations are useless,
and she turns away.

Very good; here then is one little animal, at least, who understands
for what end she has received the sense of taste, and who makes a
reasonable use of it. Very different from some children of my
acquaintance, who heedlessly stuff into their mouths whatever comes
into their hands, without even taking the trouble to taste it, and who
would escape a good many stomach-aches, if nothing else, if they were
as sensible as Pussy.

This is the really useful side of _the sense of taste_; but its
agreeable side, which is sufficiently well known to you, is not to be
despised either, even on the grounds of utility.

You must know, between ourselves, that eating would be a very tiresome
business if we did not taste what we are eating; and I can well imagine
what trouble mammas would have in persuading their children to come
to dinner or tea, if it were only a question of working their little
jaws, and nothing further. What struggles--what tears! And setting
aside children, who are by no means always the most disobedient to the
will of a good GOD, how few men would care to stop in the midst of
their occupations, to go and grind their teeth one against another for
half-an-hour, if there were not some pleasure attached to an exercise
not naturally amusing in itself? Ay, ay, my dear child, were it not
for the reward in pleasure which is given to men when they eat, the
human race, who as a whole do not live too well already, would live
still worse. And it is necessary that we should be fed, and well fed
too, if we would perform properly here below the mission which we have
received from above.

Yes, "reward" was the word I used. Now it seems absurd to you, perhaps,
that it should be necessary to reward a man for eating a good dinner?
Well, well, GOD has been more kind to him, then, than you would be.
To every duty imposed by Him upon man, He has joined a pleasure as a
reward for fulfilling it. How many things should I not have to say to
you on this subject, if you were older? For the present, I will content
myself with making a comparison.

When a mother thinks her child is not reasonable enough to do, of her
own accord, something which it is nevertheless important she should
do, as learning to read, for instance, or to work with her needle,
&c., she comes to the rescue with rewards, and gives her a plaything
when she has done well. And thus GOD, who had not confidence enough
in man's reason to trust to it alone for supplying the wants of human
nature, has placed a plaything in the shape of pleasure after every
necessity; and in supplying the want, man finds the reward.

You will hardly believe that what I have here explained to you so
quietly by a childish comparison, has been, and alas! still is, the
subject of terrible disputes among grown-up people. If hereafter they
reach your ears, remember what I have told you now, viz., that the
pleasure lodged in the tongue and its surroundings, is a plaything,
but a plaything given to us by GOD; and that we must use it accordingly.

If a little girl has had a plaything given to her by her mother, would
she think to please her by breaking it or throwing it into a corner?
No, certainly not: she would know that in so doing she would be going
directly against her mother's intentions and wishes. Nevertheless she
would amuse herself with it in play hours, with an easy conscience,
and, if she is amiable, she will remember while she does so, that it
comes to her from her mother, and will thank her at the bottom of her
heart.

It is the same with man, of whose playthings we are speaking.

But, moreover, this little girl (it is taken for granted that she is
a good little girl) will not make the plaything the business of her
whole day, the object of all her thoughts; she will not forget
everything for it, she will leave it unhesitatingly when her mamma
calls her. Neither will she wish to be alone in her enjoyments, but
will gladly see her little friends also enjoy similar playthings,
because she thinks that what is good for her must be good for others
too.

It is thus that man should do with his playthings; but, alas! this is
what he does not by any means always do with them, and hence a great
deal has been said against them. Little girls, in particular, are apt
to fail on this point, and that is how the dreadful word _gluttony_
came to be invented. For the same reason, also, people get punished
from time to time; such punishments being the consequence of the misuse
I speak of.

If people who call to see your mamma were, instead of going straight
up stairs to her, to establish themselves at the lodge with the porter,
and stay there chatting with him, do you think she would be much
flattered by their visits? And yet this is exactly what people do who,
when eating, attend only to the porter. He is so pleasant, this porter;
he says such pretty things to you, that you go on talking to him just
as if he were the master of the house, who, meanwhile, has quite gone
out of your head.

You heap sugar-plums upon sugar-plums, cakes upon cakes, sweetmeats
upon sweetmeats--everything that pleases the porter, but is of no use
whatever to the master of the house. And then what happens? The master
gets angry sometimes, and no wonder. Mr. Stomach grows weary of these
visits, which are of no use to him. He rings all the bells, makes no
end of a noise in the house, and forces that traitor of a porter who
has engrossed all his company, to do penance. You are ill--your mouth
is out of order--you have no appetite for anything. The mamma has taken
away the plaything which has been misused, and when she gives it back,
there must be great care taken not to do the same thing over again.

I have thought it only right, my dear child, in telling you the history
of eating, to give to this little detail of its beginning, a place
proportioned to your interest in it. You see by what I have said, that
you are not altogether wrong in following your taste; but neither must
it be forgotten that this part of the business is not in reality the
most important; that a plaything is but a plaything, and that the
porter is not the master of the house.

Now that we have made our good friend's acquaintance, we will wish him
farewell, and I will presently introduce you to his companions of the
antechamber, who are ranged on the two sides of the door, to make the
toilettes for the visitors who present themselves, and to put them in
order for being received in the drawing-room. You will see there some
jolly little fellows, who are also very useful in their way, and whose
history is no less curious. They are called TEETH.



LETTER IV.

THE TEETH.

When you were quite little, my dear child, and still a nursling, you
had nothing behind your lips but two little rosy bars, which were of
no service for gnawing an apple, as they were not supplied with teeth.
You had no need of these then, since nothing but milk passed your lips,
neither had your nurse bargained for your having teeth to bite with.
You see that God provides for everything, as I have already said, and
shall often have occasion to point out to you.

But by degrees the little infant grew into a great girl, and it became
necessary to think of giving her something more solid than milk to
eat; and for this purpose she required teeth. Then some little germs,
which had lain dormant, concealed within the jaws, awoke one after
another, like faithful workmen when they hear the striking of the
clock. Each set to work in his little cell, and with the help of some
phosphorus and some lime, it began to make itself a kind of white
armour, as hard as a stone, which grew larger from day to day.

You know what lime is; that sort of white pulp which you have seen
standing in large troughs where the masons are building houses, andwhich
they use in making mortar; it is with this that your little
masons build your teeth.

As to phosphorus, I am afraid you may never have seen any; but you may
have heard it spoken of. It is sold at the druggist's in the form of
little white sticks, about as thick as your finger; they have a
disagreeable, garlicky smell, and are obliged to be kept in jars of
water, because they seize every opportunity of taking fire; so I advise
you, if ever you do see any phosphorus, not to meddle with it--for in
burning, it sticks closely to the skin, and there is the greatest
difficulty in the world in extinguishing it, and the burns it makes
are fearful. I give you this caution, because phosphorus possesses a
very curious property, which might attract little girls. Wherever it
is rubbed, in the dark, on a door, or on a wall, it leaves a luminous
trail of a very peculiar appearance, which has been called
phosphorescent, from the name of the substance which produces it. And
in this way one can write on walls in letters of fire, to the terror
of cowards. Now, come; if you will promise to be very wise, and only
to make the experiment when your mamma is present, I will teach you
how to make phosphorescent lights without having to go to the
druggist's! There is a small quantity of phosphorus in lucifer matches,
which their garlicky smell proves. Rub them gently in the dark on a
bit of wood, and you will see a ray of light which will shine for some
moments. But mind, you must not play at that game when you are alone;
it is a dangerous amusement, and one hears every day of terrible
accidents caused by disobedient children playing with lucifer matches.
And while we are on the subject, let me warn you against putting them
into your mouth. Phosphorus is a poison, and such a powerful one that
people poison rats with bread-crumb balls in which it has been
introduced.

"Oh dear me! and that poison makes part of our teeth?"

Exactly so, and it even forms part of all our bones, and of the bones
of all animals; the best proof of which is, that the phosphorus of
lucifer matches has been procured out of bones from the slaughter-house.
One could make it from the teeth of little girls if one could get
enough of them.

Now I see what puzzles you, and well it may. You are asking yourself
how those little tooth-makers, the gums, get hold of this terrible
phosphorus, which is set on fire by a mere nothing, and which we dare
not put into our mouths; where do they find the lime which I also
protest is not fit to eat, and yet of which we have stores from our
heads to our feet?

It is very surprising, too, to think of its being forthcoming in the
jaws just when it is wanted there.

You begin to perceive that there are many things to be learnt before
we come to the end of our history, and that we find ourselves checked
at every step; now listen, for we are coming to something very
important.

In distant country-seats, where people are thrown entirely upon their
own resources, they must be provided beforehand with all that is
requisite for repairing the building; and there is, accordingly, a
person called a steward, who keeps everything under lock and key, and
distributes to the workmen whatever materials they may require. Thus,
the steward gives tiles to the slater, planks to the carpenter, colors
to the painter, lime and bricks to the mason--the very same lime that
we have in our teeth--in fact, he has got everything that can be wanted
in his storehouse, and it is to him that every one applies in time of
need.

Now our body also is a mansion, and has its steward too. But what a
steward--how active! what a universal genius I how inefficient by
comparison are the stewards of the greatest lords! He goes, he comes,
he is everywhere at once; and this really, and not as we use the phrase
in speaking of a merely active man: for the _being everywhere at
once_ is in this case, a fact. He keeps everything, not in a
storehouse, but what is far better, in his very pockets, which he
empties by degrees as he goes about, distributing their contents without
ever making a mistake, without stopping, without delaying; and returns
to replenish his resources in a ceaseless, indefatigable course, which
never flags, night nor day. And you can form no idea how many workmen
he has under his orders, all laboring without intermission, all
requiring different things--not one of them pausing, even for a
joke!--not even to say--"Wait a moment;"--they do not understand what
waiting means: he must always keep giving, giving, giving. By and by
we shall have a long account to give of this wonderful steward, whose
name, be it known, if you have not already guessed it, is Blood.

It is he who, one fine day when he was making his round of the jaws,
found those little germs I spoke of, awake and eager for work; and he
began at once to start them with materials. He knew that phosphorus
and lime were what they needed: he drew phosphorus and lime therefore
out of his pockets,--and, to be very exact, some other little matters
too,--but these were the most important; but I cannot stop to tell you
everything at once.

Now, where did the blood obtain this phosphorus and lime?

I expected you to ask this, but if you want everything explained as
we go along, we shall not get very far. In fact, if I answer all your
questions I shall be letting out my secret too soon, and telling you
the end of my story almost before it is begun.

So be it, however; perhaps you will feel more courage to go on, when
you know where we are going.

The steward of a country-house distributes tiles, planks, paint, bricks,
lime; but none of these things are his own, as you know; he has received
them from his master: and, in the same way, our steward has nothing
of his own: everything he distributes comes from the master of the
house, and as I have already told you, this master is the stomach. As
fast as the steward distributes, therefore, must the master renew the
stores--and renew them all, for unless he does this, the work would
stop. In proportion as the blood gives out on all sides the contents
of his pockets, the stomach must replenish them, and fill them with
everything necessary, or there would be a revolution in the house.
Now, as there can be nothing in the stomach but what has got into it
by the mouth, it behooves us to put into the mouth whatever is needed
for the supply of our numerous workmen; and this is why we eat.

I perceive that I have plunged here into an explanation out of which
I shall not easily extricate myself, for I can guess what you are going
to say next. When you began to cut your teeth, you had eaten neither
phosphorus nor lime, as nothing but milk had entered your mouth.

That is true. Neither then, nor since then, have you eaten those things,
and what is more, I hope you never will. And yet both must have got
into your mouth, for without them your teeth could never have grown.
How are we to get out of this puzzle?

Suppose now, for a moment, that instead of phosphorus and lime,
thelittle workmen in your jaws had asked the blood for sugar to make the
teeth with. Fortunately this is only a supposition; otherwise I should
be in great fear for the poor teeth: they would not last very long.
Suppose, further, that instead of your eating the lump of sugar which
was destined to turn into a tooth, your mamma had melted it in a glass
of water, and had given it to you to drink; you could not say you had
eaten sugar, and yet the sugar would really have got into your stomach,
and there would be nothing very wonderful if the stomach had found it
out and given it to the blood, and the blood had carried it off to the
place where it was wanted. Now, allowing that the lump of sugar was
very small, and the glass of water very large, the sugar might have
passed without your perceiving it, and yet the tooth would have grown
all the same, and without the help of a miracle.

And this is how it was. In the milk which you drank as a baby there
were both phosphorus and lime, though in very small quantities. There
were many other things besides; everything of course that the blood
required for the use of its work-people, because at that time the
stomach was only receiving milk, and yet all the work was going on as
usual.

And therefore, my dear child, whenever in the course of our studies,
you hear me describe such and such a thing as being within us, say
quietly to yourself, "that also was in the milk which nourished me
when I was a baby."

Of course, the same things are in what you eat now; only now they come
in a form more difficult to deal with, and the labor of detaching them
from the surrounding ingredients is much greater. The whole business
indeed of this famous machine which we are studying consists in
unfastening the links which hold things together, and in laying aside
what is useful, to be sent to the blood divested of the refuse. The
stomach was too feeble in your infancy to have encountered the work
it has to do now. It is for this reason that God devised for the benefit
of little children that excellent nourishment--milk--which contains,
all ready for use, every ingredient the blood wants; and is almost,
in fact, blood ready made.

Only think, my child, what you owe to her who gave you this nourishment!
It was actually her blood she was giving you; her blood which entered
into your veins, and which wrought within you in the wonderful way
which I have been describing. Other people gave you sugar-plums, kisses,
and toys; but she gave you the teeth which crunched the sugar-plums,
the flesh of the rosy cheeks which got the kisses, and of the little
hands which handled the toys. If ever you can forget this, you are
ungrateful indeed!

Now, beware of going on to ask me how we know that there are so many
sorts of things in milk, or I shall end by getting angry. Question
after question; why, you might drive me in this way to the end of the
world, and we should never reach the point we are aiming at. We have
already traveled far away from the teeth, concerning which I wanted
to talk to you at this time, but our lesson is nearly over and we have
scarcely said a word about them! One cannot learn everything at once.
Upon the point in question you must take my word; and as you may
believe, I would not run the risk of being contradicted before you,
by those who have authority on the subject.

Let it suffice you, for to-day, to have gained some idea of the manner
in which the materials which constitute our bodies are manufactured
within us. We have got at this by talking of the teeth; to-morrow, it
may be the saliva, the next day something else. What I have now told
you will be of use all the way through, and I do not regret the time
we have given to the subject. If you have understood that well; the
time has not been lost.



LETTER V.

THE TEETH _(continued.)_

My thoughts return involuntarily to the subject I last explained to
you, my dear child, and I find that I have a great deal to say about
it still.

You see now, I hope, that we have something else to consult besides
a dainty taste when we are eating; and that if we are to work to any
good purpose we must think a little about this poor blood; who has so
much to do, and who often finds himself so much at fault, when we send
him nothing but barley-sugar and biscuits for his support. It is not
with such stuff as that, as you may well imagine, that he can be enabled
to answer satisfactorily to the constant demands of his little workmen,
and we expose him to the risk of getting into disgrace with them, if
we furnish him with no better provisions.

And who is the sufferer? Not I who am giving you this information,
most certainly.

Now, when children hesitate about eating plain food, and fly from beef
to rush at dessert, they act as a man would do who should begin to
build by giving his workmen reeds instead of beams, and squares of
gingerbread instead of bricks. A pretty house he would have of
it;--just think!

On the contrary, what your mother asks you to eat, my dear little
epicure, is sure to be something which contains the indispensable
supplies for which your blood is craving; for people knew all about
this by experience long before they could explain the why and the
wherefore. But now that you are so much better informed than even the
most learned men were a century ago, pouting and wry faces at table
are no longer excusable, and I should be sadly ashamed of you if I
should hear you continued to make them.

And this is what I was more particularly thinking of just now, when
I took up my pen again. No doubt it is very amusing to be able to look
clearly into one's frame, and see what goes on inside, but the amusement
anything affords is the least important part of it; you have begun to
find this out already, and you will find it out more and more every
day. What seems to me one of the great advantages of the study we have
begun together is, that at every step you take you will meet with the
most practical and useful instruction, as well as the most unanswerable
reasons for doing what your parents ask you to do every day.

To obey without knowing why is certainly possible, and may be done
happily enough. But we obey more readily and easily when we understand
the reason for doing so; and a duty which one can satisfy oneself
about, forces itself upon one as a sort of necessity. And what can
throw a stronger light on our duties than a thorough acquaintance with
ourselves?

It is upwards of two thousand two hundred years ago (and that is not
yesterday, you must own!) since one of the greatest minds of the
world--Socrates--never forget that name--taught his disciples, as a
foundation precept, this apparently simple maxim, "Know thyself." He
meant this, it is true, in a much higher sense than we are aiming at
in these conversations of ours, but his rule is so practical, that
although you have only as yet taken a mere peep into one small corner
of self-knowledge, you find, if I am not much mistaken, that your heart
has beaten once or twice rather faster than it did before. Was I wrong,
in saying from the beginning, that we become better as we grow in
knowledge? Is it not true that you have felt more tenderly than ever
towards her who nourished you with her milk, since I explained to you
the value of milk; and that you have kissed your mother's hand all the
more lovingly since you heard my history of the hand? To tell you the
truth, if you had not done so, I should have been dissatisfied both
with you and myself.

And wait! While we are talking thus, another thought has come into my
head about hands and nurses, which I must tell you of.

There is something of the nurse, my child, in those who take the best
fruits of their intellect and heart, and transform them, as it were,
into milk, in order that your infant soul may receive a nourishment
it will be able to digest without too much effort. In this way their
very soul enters into you, and it is but fair that you should reward
them as they deserve. Young as you are, too, you have a recompense in
your power: one more acceptable even than Academic prizes--of which
it is indispensable not to be too avaricious--you can give them your
love.

Besides, it is not only hands but heads that are at work for you, and
of these many more than you suppose; and your debt of gratitude is as
much due to the one as to the other.

Perhaps my first letter may have led you to suppose that I was inclined
to laugh at what I called learned men; and they are perhaps a little
to blame for not thinking often enough about little girls; but
nevertheless these men are of the greatest use to them in an indirect
way. You owe them much, therefore, and without them could have known
nothing of what I am teaching you. It is very grand for us, is it not,
to know that there is phosphorus and lime in our teeth? But it took
generations of learned men, and investigations and discoveries without
end, and ages of laborious study, to extract from nature this secret
which you have learnt in five minutes. And whatever others you may
learn hereafter, remember that it is the same story with all. While
profiting, therefore, at your ease, by all these conquests of science,
I would have you hold in grateful recollection those who have gained
them at so much cost to themselves: almost always at the expense of
their fortune, sometimes at the peril of their lives.

There they are, observe, a little knot of men with no sort of outward
pretension. They speak a language which scares children away. They
weigh dirty little powders in apothecaries' scales; steep sheets of
copper in acid-water; and watch air-bubbles passing through bent glass
tubes, some of which are as dangerous as cannon balls. They scrape old
bones, and slice scraps no bigger than a pin's head. They keep theireyes
fixed for hours upon things they are examining through microscopes
of a dozen glasses, and when you go to see what they are looking at,
you find nothing at all. To see them at work, in what they call their
laboratories, you would say that they were a set of madmen. But at the
end, it is found, some fine day, that they have changed the face of
the earth; have worked revolutions before which emperors and kings bow
in respect; have enriched nations by millions at a time; have revealed
to the human race, divine laws of which it had hitherto been ignorant;
finally, have furnished the means of teaching little boys and girls
some very curious things, which will make them more agreeable as well
as reasonable. And this is a benefit not to be despised, since these
children are destined one day to become fathers and mothers, and so
to govern the next generation; and the better they themselves are
instructed, the better this will be done.

But now let us go back to the poor teeth, whom we seem to have forgotten
altogether. However, we knew very well that they would not run away
meantime.

I told you before that it was their business to dress and prepare
whatever was presented to them, but the reception they bestow is not
one which would suit every body's taste, for it consists in being made
mince-meat of And in order to do their work in the best way possible
they divide their labor; some cut up, others tear, and others pound.

First, there are those flat teeth in front of the two jaws, just below
the nose. Touch yours with the tip of your finger; you will find that
they terminate in sharp-edged blades, like knives. These are called
_incisors,_ from the Latin word _incidere,_ which means to cut, and it
is with them we bite bread and apples, where the first business is to
cut. It is with the same teeth that lazy little girls bite their thread,
when they will not take the trouble to find their scissors; and, by the
by, this is a very bad trick, because by rubbing them one against
another in this manner we wear them out, and, as you will soon discover,
worn-out teeth never grow again.

The next sort are those little pointed teeth, which come after the
_incisors,_ on each side of both jaws. You will easily find them;
and if you press against them a little, you will feel their points.
If we call the first set the knives of the mouth, we may call these
its forks. They serve to pierce whatever requires to be torn, and they
are called _canine_ teeth, from the Latin word _canis_, a dog, because
dogs make great use of them in tearing their food. They place their paws
upon it, and plunging the canine teeth into it, pull off pieces by a
jerk of the head. Look into the mouth of papa's dog: you will recognize
these teeth by their rather curved points. They are longer than the
rest, and are called fangs. I do not know, after all, why they have
chosen to name these teeth _canine_, as all carnivorous animals have the
same fangs, and in the lion, the tiger, and many other species, they are
much more developed and sharper than in the dog. In cats they are like
little nails. However, the name is given, and we cannot alter it.

The last teeth, which are placed at the back of the jaw, are called
molars, from the Latin word _mola_, which means a millstone.

You must be prepared to meet with several Latin words as we go on; but
never mind; this will give you the opportunity of learning a little
Latin, and so of keeping your brother in order, if he ever looks down
upon you because he is learning Latin at school. Formerly, all learned
men wrote in Latin, and as they ruled supreme in all such subjects as
those we are discussing, they gave to everything such names as they
pleased, without consulting the public, who did not just then trouble
their heads about the matter. Now they give Greek names, which can
hardly be called an improvement; but if they ever wish to attract the
attention of little girls they must translate their hard words into
our own language.

To return to our grinders: they perform the same office as a miller's
millstone; that is to say, they grind everything that comes in their
way. These teeth have flat, square tops, with little inequalities on
the surface, which you can feel the moment you lay your finger on them.
These are the largest and strongest of the three sets, and with them
we even crack nuts, when we prefer the risk of breaking our teeth to
the trouble of looking for the nut-crackers!

Now, I will answer for it that you cannot explain to me why we always
place what is hard to break between the _molars,_ and never employ
the _incisors_ in the work? And yet everybody does this alike--from
the child to the grown-up man--and all equally without thinking of
what they are doing.

I will tell you the reason, however, if you will first tell me why,
when you are going to snip off the tip of your thread (which offers
very little resistance), you do it with the point of your scissors;
whereas you put any tough thing which is likely to resist strongly (a
match, for instance) close up to their hinge; particularly if you have
no scruple about spoiling the scissors, by the way!

If you were a grown-up lad, and I were teaching you natural philosophy,
I should have here a fine opportunity for explaining what is called
_the theory of the lever_. But I think _the theory of the lever_ would
frighten you; so we must get out of the difficulty in some other way.

I find, however, that I have been joking so much as I went along, that
I have but little space left, and feel quite ashamed of myself. We
seem quite unlucky over these teeth.

I have already been scolded by people who are not altogether wrong in
accusing me of losing my time in chattering, first of one thing and
then of another. They complain that by thus nibbling at every blade
of grass on the way-side we shall never get to the end of our journey;
and there is some truth in what they say. Still, I will whisper to you
in excuse that I thought we might play truant a little bit while we
were on familiar ground, where naturally you were sure to feel a
particular interest in everything. The hand, the tongue, the
teeth--these are all old friends of yours--and I thought you would
like to hear all about them. By-and-bye we shall be in the little black
hole, and then we shall get on much more rapidly.



LETTER VI.

THE TEETH _(continued)._

I left off at the _molars_, which are the teeth one selects to
crack nuts with; and if I remember rightly, we talked about different
ways of cutting with scissors.

Let us look at the subject from a distance, that we may understand it
more clearly. Let us imagine a horse drawing a heavy cart slowly along.
Ask it to gallop, and it will answer, "With all my heart! but you must
give me a lighter carriage to draw." And now fancy another flying over
the ground with a gig behind it. Ask it to exchange the gig for the
cart, and it will say, "Yes; but then I shall have to go slowly."

Whereby you see that with the same amount of strength to work with,
one has the choice of two things: either of conquering a great
resistance slowly, or a slight one quickly.

And it is partly on this account, dear child, that I teach you so
gradually; for young heads, fresh to the work, are less easily drawn
along than others, and have but a certain amount of strength.

Hitherto all has been clear as the day. Now take your scissors in your
left hand; hold the lower ring of the handle firmly between your thumb
and closed hand, so that the blade shall remain straight and immovable:
then with your other hand cause the upper ring to go up and down, and
watch the blade as it moves. The whole of it moves at once, and is put
in motion by the same power--viz., your right hand. But the point makes
a long circuit in the air, while the hinge end makes only a very little
one--indeed, moves almost imperceptibly: and, as you may imagine, a
different sort of effort is required from the motive power (your hand)
according as resistance is made at the point or at the hinge. The point
goes full gallop: it is the horse in the gig; the light work is for
him. The hinge moves slowly; it is the cart-horse, and takes the heavy
labor.

I hope I have made you understand this, for it explains the cracking
of our nut, though you may not suspect it. Move your scissors once
more in the same way. Now, you have before you the pattern of the two
jaws on one side of your face, from the ear to the nose; the upper
one, which never moves (as you may convince yourself by placing a
finger on your upper lip when you either speak or eat), and the lower
one which goes up and down. Two pairs of scissors set points to points
give you the whole jaw. The _incisors_ are at the points, they
gallop up and down, and are worthless for doing hard work; the
_molars_ are at the hinges, and move slowly; and if anything tough
has to be dealt with, it comes to them as a matter of course; hence
they are the nutcrackers. You must own that it is pleasant to reflect
thus upon what we are doing every day, and the next time you see a
stonemason moving stones of twenty times his own weight with his iron
bar, ask your papa to explain to you the principle of the lever. After
what I have told you, you will understand it very readily, or at least
enough of it to satisfy your mind.

But, besides this power of moving up and down, the lower jaw possesses
another less obvious one, by means of which it goes from right to left.
This is precisely what naughty children make use of when they grind
their teeth: not that I mean this remark for you, for I have a better
opinion of you than to suppose you do such things. Those who make such
bad use of their jaws deserve to lose the power of ever moving them
thus, and then they would find themselves sadly at a loss how to chew
their bread--for their _molars_ would be of but little service
to them in such a case; as it is chiefly by this second action of the
jaw that the food is pounded. Try to chew a bit of bread by only moving
your jaw up and down, and you will soon tire of the attempt.

One word more to complete my description of the teeth: that portion
of them which is in the jaw is called the _root_; and the _incisors_,
which cannot work hard because, like the gig-horses, they have but
little resisting power, possess only small and short roots; whereas the
_canines,_ whose duty it is to tear the food sideways, would run the
risk of being dragged out and left sticking in the substances they are
at work upon, if they were not well secured; these, therefore, have
roots which go much deeper into the jaw, and in consequence of this they
give us more pain than the others when the dentist extracts them: those
famous _eye-teeth_, which so terrify people on such occasions, are the
_canines_ of the upper jaw, and lie, in fact, just below the eye.

The _molars_ meanwhile would be in danger of being shaken in the
sideway movement, while chewing: so they do as you would do if you
were pushed aside. Now you would throw out your feet right and left
in order to steady yourself, and thus the molars, which have always
two roots, throw them out right and left for the same purpose. Some
have three, some four, and they require no less for the business they
have to do.

Above the root comes what is called the crown; that is the part of the
tooth which is exposed to the air; the part which does the work, and
which bears the brunt of all the rubbing. Now, however hard it may be,
it would soon end in being worn out by all this fun if it were not
covered by a still harder substance, which is called _enamel_.
The _enamel_ which forms the coating of china plates, and which
you can easily distinguish by examining a broken plate, will give you
a very exact idea of it. It is this enamel which gives the teeth the
polish and brilliancy we so much admire, and it is desirable to be
very careful of it, not out of vanity, though there is no objection
to a little vanity on the subject, but because the enamel is
the protector of the teeth, and when that is destroyed, you may say
good-bye to the teeth themselves. All acids eat into the enamel, as
vinegar or lemon-juice does into marble; and one of the best means of
preserving this protecting armor of the teeth is never to eat the unripe
windfalls of fruit, which I have seen unreasonable children pick up in
orchards and devour so recklessly. They give sufficient warning, by
their acidity, that they are not fit for food, and when this warning is
neglected, they take their revenge by corroding the enamel of the
teeth; not to speak of the disturbance which they afterwards cause in
the poor stomach.

I said that without this coating of enamel, the teeth would be
prematurely worn out, the reason of which is, that the teeth have not
the property of growing again, as the nails and hair have. When those
little germs of which I spoke when we began to describe the teeth,
have finished their work, they perish and fall out, like masons who,
when they have built the house, take their departure forever.

But the "forever" wants explanation. For such stern conditions would
fall hard on very little children, who, not having come to their reason,
cannot be expected to understand the great value of their teeth, and
take all the care they need of them. So to them _a second_ chance
is given.

Your first teeth, the _milk-teeth_, as they are called, count for
nothing: they are a kind of specimen, just to serve while you are very
young.

When you are approaching what is called the age of reason, (and this
word implies a great deal, my dear child,) the real teeth, the teeth
which are to serve you for life, begin to whisper among themselves,
"Now, here is a little girl who is becoming reasonable, and who will
soon, or else never, be fit to take charge of her teeth." No sooner
said than done: other masons set to work in other cells, placed under
the first set, and as the permanent teeth keep growing and growing,
they gradually push out the milk-teeth, which were only keeping their
places ready for them till they came.

This is just your case at present, and you now understand your
responsibility, and how necessary it is to preserve those good teeth
which have placed so generous a confidence in your care of them, and
which, once gone, can never be replaced.

You have no loss by the exchange; you had twenty-four at first, you
will now have twenty-eight. Twenty-eight, did I say? nay, you will
have thirty-two; but the last four will come later still. The last
_molars_ on each side, above and below, in both jaws, will not
make their appearance till you are grown up. They are a fastidious and
timid set, and will not run any risks; and they are called
_wisdom-teeth_, because they do not appear till we are supposed
to have arrived at years of discretion. Some people do not cut them
before they are thirty, and you will agree that, if they have not
become wise by that time, they have but a very poor chance of ever
being so!

There is much more still to be said about the teeth; but I think I
have told you quite enough to teach you the importance of these little
bony possessions of yours, which children do not always value as they
deserve, and whose safety they endanger as carelessly as if they had
fresh supplies of them ready in their pockets. If so many skilful
contrivances have been devised for enabling us to masticate our food
properly, it is clear that this process is not an unimportant one.
Those, therefore, who swallow a mouthful after two or three turns,
forget that they are thereby forcing the stomach to do the work the
teeth have neglected to do, and this is very bad economy, I can assure
you. You will see hereafter, when we speak about animals, that by a
marvellous compensation of nature, the power of the stomach is always
great in proportion to the _in_efficiency of the teeth, and that
by the same rule, it is weakest when the jaws are best furnished. Now,
no jaw is more completely furnished than the human one; it is clear,
then, that it should do its own work and not leave it to be done by
those who are less able: and the little girl who, in order to finish
her dinner more quickly, shirks the use of her teeth, and sends food,
half chewed, into her stomach, is like a man who, having two servants,
the one strong and vigorous, the other feeble and delicate, allows the
first to dawdle at his ease, and puts all the hard work on the other.
He would be very unjust in so doing, would he not? And as injustice
always meets with its reward, his work is sure to be badly done.

Now, the work in question consists in reducing what we eat into a sort
of pulp or liquid paste, from which the blood extracts at last whatever
it requires. But the teeth may bite and tear the materials as they
please, they can make nothing of them but a powder, which would never
turn into a pulp, if during their labors they were not assisted by an
indispensable auxiliary. To make pap for infants what do we add to the
bread after it is cut in little bits? Without being a very clever cook,
you will know that it is water which is wanted. And thus, to assist
us in making pap for the blood, Providence has furnished us with a
number of small spongy organs within the mouth, which are always filled
with water. These are called _salivary glands_. This water oozes
out from them of itself, on the least movement of the jaw, which presses
upon the sponges as it goes up and down. The name of this water, as
I need scarcely tell you, is _saliva_.

When I call it water, it is not merely from its resemblance; _saliva_ is
really pure water with a little _albumen_ added. Do not be afraid of
that word--it is not so alarming as it appears to be. It means simply
the substance you know as the _white of egg_. There is also a little
soda in the water, which you know is one of the ingredients of which
soap is made. And this explains why the saliva becomes frothy, when the
cheeks and tongue set it in motion in the mouth while we are talking;
just as the whites of egg, or soapy water, become frothy when whipped up
or beaten in a basin.

But the albumen and the soda have not been added to the saliva, in our
case, merely to make it frothy; that would have been of very little
use. They give to the water a greater power to dissolve the food into
paste, and thus to begin that series of transformations by which it
gradually becomes the fine red blood which shows itself in little drops
at the tip of your finger when you have been using your needle
awkwardly.

When once minced up by the teeth and moistened by the saliva, the food
is reduced to a state of pulp, and having nothing further to do in the
mouth, is ready to pass forward. But getting out of the mouth on its
journey downwards is not so simple an affair as getting into it by the
_front door_, as it did at first. Swallowing is in fact a complicated
action, and not to be explained in half a dozen words, and I think we
have already chatted enough for to-day. I only wish I may not have tired
you out with these interminable teeth! But you may expect something
quite new when I begin again.



LETTER VII.

THE THROAT.

You remember a certain door-keeper, or porter, of whom we have already
spoken a good deal, who resides in the mouth--the sense of taste, I
mean?

Well, it is a porter's business to sweep out the entrance to a house,
and you may always recognize him in the courtyard by his broom.

And accordingly our porter too has a broom specially placed at his
service, namely, the tongue; and an unrivalled broom it is--for it is
self-acting, never wears out, and makes no dust--qualities we cannot
succeed in obtaining in any brooms of our own manufacture.

When the time has come for the pounded mouthful (described in the last
chapter) to travel forward (the teeth having properly prepared it),
the broom begins its work; scouring all along the gums, twisting and
turning right and left, backwards and forwards, up and down; picking
up the least grains of the pulp which have been manufactured in the
mouth; and as the heap increases, it makes itself into a shovel--another
accomplishment one would scarcely have expected it to possess. What
it gathers together thus, rolls by degrees on its surface into a ball,
which at last finds itself fixed between the palate and the tongue in
such a manner that it cannot escape; at which moment the tongue presses
its tip against the upper front teeth, forms of itself an inclined
plane, and--but stop! we are getting on too fast.

At the back of the mouth, (which is the antechamber, as we said before,)
is a sort of lobby, separated from the mouth by a little fleshy
tongue_let_, suspended to the palate, exactly like those tapestry
curtains which are sometimes hung between two rooms, under which one
is enabled to pass, by just lifting them up.

If this lobby led only from the mouth to the stomach, the act of
swallowing would be the simplest thing in the world; the tongue would
be raised, the pounded ball would glide on, would pass under the
curtain, and then good-bye to it. Unfortunately, however, the architect
of the house seems to have economized his construction-apparatus here.
The lobby serves two purposes; it is the passage from the mouth to the
stomach, as well as from the nose to the lungs.

The air we breathe has its two separate doors there--one opening
towards the nose, the other towards the lungs; through neither of which
is any sort of food allowed to pass. But, as you may imagine, the food
itself knows nothing of such spiteful restraints, and it is a matter
of perfect indifference to it through which of the doors it passes.
Not unlike a good many children who, though they are reasonable
creatures, will push their way into places where they have been
forbidden to go; and who can expect a pulpy food-ball to be more
reasonable than a child? It was necessary, therefore, so to arrange
matters that there should be no choice on the subject; that when the
food-ball got into the lobby it should find no door open but its own,
namely, that which led to the stomach. And that is exactly what is
done.

You have not, perhaps, remarked that in the act of swallowing, something
rises and contracts itself at the same moment in your throat, producing
a kind of internal convulsion which jerks whatever is inside. People
do not think about it when they are eating, because it is an involuntary
action, and their attention is otherwise engaged.

But try to swallow when there is nothing in your mouth, and you will
perceive what I mean at once.

Now, imagine our lobby at the back of the throat as a small closet,
with a doorway in its wall, half-way up, the doorway being closed by
a curtain. In the ceiling is a hole, which leads to the nose; in the
floor two large tubes open out; the front one leading to the lungs,
the one behind, to the stomach.

Now swallow, and I will tell you what happens. The curtain rises up
and clings to the ceiling, and thus the passage to the nose is stopped
up. The lung-tube rises along the wall, and hides itself under the
door, contracting itself, and making itself quite small, as if it
wished to leave plenty of room for the mouthful of food which is about
to pass over it; and, for still greater security, at the very moment
it rises, it pushes against a small trap-door which shuts up its mouth.
No other road remains, therefore, but through the tube which leads to
the stomach; the pulpy mouthful drops straight therein, without risk
of mistake, and when it is once there, everything readjusts itself as
before.

These are very ingenious contrivances, and I will venture to say that
if we would but study the wonders of the marvellous and varied machinery
which is constantly at work in our behalf within us, we should be much
better employed than in learning things from which no practical good
can be derived. Moreover, we should be ashamed to trust, like the lower
animals, only to our instinct, (which, after all, is much less developed
in us than in them,) for blindly escaping the thousand chances of
destruction that beset a structure so fragile and delicate in its
contrivances as the human body. Besides, it is not only our own
machinery that is entrusted to us, we are liable to be responsible for
that of others, whose development it is our duty to guard and watch;
and how can we do this with a safe conscience, if we are ignorant of
the construction, the action, the laws of all sorts which the great
Artificer has, so to speak, made use of in forming our bodies?

When you, in your turn, are a mother, you dear little rogue, who sit
there opening wide your bright eyes, and not comprehending a word of
what I am saying, you will be glad that you were taught when you were
little, how your own little girl ought to be managed. You will find
a hundred opportunities of making good use, in her behalf, of what you
and I are learning together, and in the meantime there is no reason
why you should not yourself profit by the knowledge you have gained.

I am quite sure, for instance, that in repeating to your child the
simple rule of politeness, with which everybody is acquainted, "_Never
talk when you are eating_," you will be very careful to add, "_and
especially when you are swallowing_," for reasons I am about to detail.

When we want to speak we have to drive the air from the lungs into the
mouth, and our words are sounds produced by this air as it passes
through. This is the reason why I advise you to go on gently, and make
the proper stops in reading aloud: to _take breath_, in fact, as
it is called; otherwise, breath would all at once fail you, and you
would be obliged to stop short in the middle of a sentence and wait
like a simpleton till you had refilled the lungs with air by breathing.
It was for this purpose, also, and not for mere economy's sake, as you
may have thought, that the little cross-road of four doors has been
placed at the back of the mouth, enabling it to communicate at pleasure
with either the lungs or the stomach. It is a dangerous passage for
food-parcels making their way to the stomach; but if you could
substitute for it, as it may have occurred to you to do lately, a
simple tube going directly to the stomach,--behold! you would find
yourself dumb;--a serious misfortune, eh? for a little girl! But come,
I am quizzing too much, so console yourself. I know many grown-up
people who would be at least as sorry as yourself.

To return to our subject. We have said that, in order to guard against
accidents, the lung-tube is closed at the moment we are about to
swallow. But if by any unlucky chance the air is coming up from the
lungs at the same moment, it must have a free passage. Its tube cannot
help returning to its place; the little trap-door which shuts up the
opening opens whether or no, and then adieu to all the precautions of
good Mother Nature! The mouthful when it drops, falls outside of its
proper tube--that is to say, into the other, which is exactly in front
of it, and we find that we have _swallowed the wrong way_.

You know what happens in such a case. You cough and cough till you are
torn to pieces, till you grow scarlet, or even blue in the face; till
you lose your breath; till your body trembles; till your eyes start
out of their sockets. Let who will be there, there is no resource but
to hide your face in your handkerchief. The tube, which was only made
for the passage of air, on finding an intruder forcing an entrance,
does its utmost to drive it back through the door. Then the lungs,
which would be destroyed by its getting to them, come to the assistance
of the faithful servant who is struggling for their protection: they
agitate themselves violently, and send forth gusts of air which drive
all before them. Thence arises the cough, and by this means at last
the enemy is thrust out of the mouth, like dust before the wind. And
it is only when the passages are cleared that the storm subsides. But
the commotion is no laughing matter, I assure you; for if one had
swallowed a little _too far_ the wrong way, or if the substance
swallowed had been too heavy for the air-tube, aided by the lungs, to
eject within a certain time, death would have ensued: instances of
which are by no means unknown. Nature does nothing in vain; this is
no case of a man frightened by a mouse. When you find your whole being
concentrating its efforts to one point, and betraying such distress,
at an accident apparently so trifling, you may be sure there is danger,
and real danger too; and if you doubt it, that makes no
difference--happily for you.

Now you have learned why little girls should not attempt to talk and
swallow at the same time, and, I may add, still less laugh; for
laughingis a kind of somersault, performed by the lungs, and is always
accompanied by the ejectment of a great deal more breath than is
necessary in speaking, so that the jerks it occasions derange still
more the wise provisions made to protect life whenever we swallow
anything, and therefore we are more apt to swallow the wrong way while
laughing than while speaking.

Need I say that we ought equally to guard against making others laugh
or talk; or exciting, or frightening them, while they are swallowing;
in short, avoid doing anything to create a sudden shock which might
suddenly force the air out of their lungs, and cause them in the same
manner to swallow the wrong way? Politeness requires this from us, and
what I have now said will fix the lesson still more strongly on your
mind. What would become of you if you were to see a person die in your
presence in consequence of some foolish joke, however apparently
innocent?

Not to conclude with so painful a picture, I will, before we part,
give you the right names of the _curtain_, the _lobby_ or _closet_, and
the _tubes_ of which we have been speaking.

The curtain is called the _Soft Palate_.

The lobby, the _Pharynx_.

The tube which leads to the stomach, the _Aesophagus_.

The tube leading to the lungs, the _Larynx_.

The opening of this tube is the _Glottis_, and the little trap-door
which closes it when one swallows, is the _Epiglottis_.

You must excuse my attempting to explain the meanings of all these
names; it would take me too long to do so. After all, the mere names
are nothing. If I have succeeded in making you understand how all the
different parts act, you may call them what you like.

Here we will rest. We are now on our way to where we shall see the
large apartments, and be introduced to the master, that head of the
house, whom no one can approach without so many ceremonies.



LETTER VIII.

THE STOMACH.

Once in the _oesophagus_ (you remember this is the name of the tube
which leads to the stomach), the mouthful of food has nothing to do but
to proceed on its way. All along this tube there is a succession
of small elastic rings, [Footnote: Properly, _contractile circular
fibres_.] which contract behind the food to force it forward, and
widen before it to give it free passage. They thus propel it forward,
one after another, till it reaches the entrance to the stomach, into
which the last ring pushes it, closing upon it at the same time.

Have you ever observed a worm or a leech in motion? You see a successive
swelling up of the whole surface of its body, as the creature gradually
pushes forward, just as if there was something in its inside rolling
along from the tail to the head. Such is precisely the appearance which
the _oesophagus_ would present to you, as the food passes down it, if
you had the opportunity of seeing it in action; and this has been called
_the vermicular movement_, in consequence of its resemblance to the
movement of a worm.

Here I wish to draw your attention to the very important fact, that
this movement is in one respect of a quite different nature from that
of your thumb when you take hold of a bit of bread, or that of your
jaw when you bite with your teeth, or of your tongue, &c., when you
swallow. All these actions belong to yourself, to a certain extent;
they are voluntary, and under your own guidance; that is, you may
perform them or not, as you choose. There is a constant connexion
between you and them, and you knew what I meant at once as I named
each of them in succession. But in speaking of this other movement we
enter upon another world, of which you know nothing. Here is the black
hole of which I spoke. The little rings of the _oesophagus_ perform
their work by themselves, and you have no power in the matter. Not
only do they move independently of you, but were you to take it into
your head to stop them, it would be about as wise a proceeding as if
you were to talk to them. We will speak hereafter, in another place,
of these impertinent servants, who do not recognise your authority,
and with whom we shall have constantly to do, throughout what remains
to be said on the subject of eating. The truth is, your body is like
a little kingdom, of which you have to be the queen, but queen of the
frontiers only. The arms, the legs, the lips, the eyelids, all the
exterior parts, are your very humble servants; at your slightest bidding
they move or keep still: your will is their law. But in the interior
you are quite unknown. There, there is a little republic to itself,
ruling itself independently of your orders, which it would laugh at,
if you attempted to issue them.

This republic, to make use of another metaphor, is the kitchen of the
body. It is there they make blood, as they know how; putting it to all
sorts of uses for your advantage, it is true, but without your consent.
You are in the position of the lady of a house whose servants have
shut the door of the kitchen in her face that they may carry on their
business after their own fashion, leaving only the housemaid and
coachman at her command. It may be humiliating, perhaps, to be thus
only partially mistress at home; but what can you do, my little
demi-queen? I will tell you: make up your mind to govern the subjects
under your orders as wisely as possible; and, as to the rest, be content
with the only resource left you: viz., that of looking in at the window
of the kitchen to see what goes on there!

The stomach is the head cook: the president of the internal republic.
He has charge of the stoves; the whole weight of affairs is on his
hands, and he provides for the interests of all. Aesop taught us this,
long ago, in his fable of "The Belly and Members." [Footnote: La
Fontaine's translation is quoted in the French original, where the
name of the fable is "_Messer Gaster_," a more correct title than our
own. _Gaster_ is a Greek word signifying stomach; and it is strictly
_the stomach_ which is _meant_ in the fable. From this comes, too, the
medical term _gastritis_, the name of a disease of the stomach.--TR.] It
is a very good fable, and was wisely appealed to once by a Roman Consul
to appease a disturbance in the State. But the application was not quite
fair in one respect; and since I have started the subject, I will
satisfy myself by explaining to you where it was wrong. The time will
not be wasted, for this fable has furnished information to a great many
people about the economy of their insides, and possibly to you; and I
should like you to know the exact truth of all the particulars alluded
to. Whether Aesop understood them all, I cannot pretend to say; but the
application by the old Roman to the quarrel between the big-wig senators
and the people was on one point decidedly unjust; for there was, as far
as facts are concerned, something to be said on behalf of the stomach,
which Consul Menenius seems not to have thought of.

When you come to this part of the Roman history you will learn that
the Roman Senate was a large and fat stomach, which did, it is true,
furnish good nourishment to the other members of the State, but kept
the best share for itself. We may say this now without risk of offence,
it having been dead for so long a time. Our stomach is the leanest,
slightest, frailest part of our body. It is master in the sense in
which it is said in the Gospel, "Let him that is first among you be
the servant of the others." It receives everything, but it gives
everything back, and keeps nothing, or almost nothing, for itself.
Between ourselves, Consul Menenius, the advocate of the Senate, had
no business to talk to the poor wretches at Rome of any comparison
between their government and so careful an administrator of the public
good as a human stomach. He should have taken his subject of comparison
from the families of geese or ducks--animals which have no teeth. These
have strong, well-grown stomachs--true Roman senators--whose stoutness
is in proportion to the work given them to do. But man provides his
with work already prepared by chewing, supposing him to have had the
sense to chew it, of course. It was not from a comparison with man,
therefore, that Menenius ought to have got his boasted apologue, which
was but a poor jest on the subject.

You did not expect, my dear, to come in for a lesson on Roman History
in a discussion on the stomach. But the study of nature is connected
with everything else, though without appearing to be so, and I was not
sorry to give you, incidentally, this proof of the unexpected light
which it throws, as we go along, upon a thousand questions which appear
perfectly foreign to it. Look, for example, at this old fable cited
by Menenius. For the two thousand years and upwards that it has been
in circulation, troops of historians, poets, orators, and writers of
all kinds, have passed it forward from one to the other, without having
troubled themselves to investigate the laws of nature in connection
with the stomach; therefore, not one, that I am aware of, has observed
this small error, so trifling in appearance, so important in reality,
which nevertheless is obvious to the first young naturalist who thinks
the matter over.

But enough of the Romans. Let us return to our master--the head cook,
if you choose to call him so.

I was telling you just now that he managed the stoves, and you may
have thought that I was merely using similes, as I am apt to do. But
not so: it is quite true that he cooks; and so now tell me, if you
can, whence he gets his fire to cook with, or rather, to speak more
correctly, who gives it to him?

Now you are quite puzzled, so I must help you out.

In the mansion we were talking about some time ago, to whom would anyone
who wanted to light a fire, apply for wood?

I think you can answer this yourself, for you cannot have forgotten
our famous steward, who gives everything to everybody. But, you will
wonder, I dare say, how the blood can carry wood in his pockets.
Wood? Ay, and real wood too, as we shall soon see: but it is not wood
we are talking about now. The blood has something more to the purpose
than wood in his pockets, for he has heat ready made. So when the
stomach wishes to set to work, it appeals to the blood, which comes
running from all parts of the body, and heats it so effectually that
everything within is really and actually cooked. This is why one feels
a sort of slight shudder down the back when the stomach has a great
deal to do at once, for the blood being called for in a hurry, comes
rushing along in great gushes, and carries with it the heat from the
other parts of the body.

It is for this reason, too, that it is so dangerous to bathe when the
stomach is at work cooking, because the cold of the water drives
suddenly back all the blood which has accumulated around the little
saucepan, and this causes such a shock in the body that people often
die of it.

Do not ask me, to-day, where this heat of the blood comes from; we
will speak of that hereafter. But I may tell you at once that our dear
steward is not a bit cleverer in this matter than other people, and
obtains his heat, like the humblest mortal, by burning his wood. Do
not puzzle yourself to find out how. Enough that he burns it as we do,
and by a similar process.

Well, in one way or another, the master cook has his fire at command.
You know also, already, what it is he has to get cooked; namely, the
pulpy stew, which has begun in the mouth by chewing, and which it is
his business now to finish perfectly. Now see what a cook does who has
got her stew over the fire. She turns and turns it again and again,
and shakes the saucepan from time to time, that the ingredients may
be more thoroughly mixed up together; and this is precisely what is
done by the stomach; for all the time that the cooking is going on,
he swells and contracts himself alternately, after the fashion of those
rings of the _oesophagus_ we were talking about, tossing and tumbling
the food from one side to another, so as to knead it, as it were.

Again, the cook adds water to her stew from time to time to keep it
moist; and so the stomach pours constantly upon his stew a liquid,
which contains a great deal of water, and which flows in from a quantity
of little holes, sunk in his delicate coats.

What more?

The cook puts in a little salt: and this the stomach takes care not
to forget either, for he is a cook who understands his business. In
the liquid of which I am speaking, there is, if not exactly salt as
one sees it at table, at all events the most active part of salt, that
which possesses in the highest degree the property of reducing
everything we eat to a paste; and this is the real reason why we find
all food so insipid which has not been seasoned with salt. As salt
contains a principle essential to the work to be done by the stomach,
some method had to be devised to induce us to provide him with it, and
this method the porter up above has hit upon. He makes a face if we
offer him anything without a little salt on it, as much as to say--"How
can you expect them to cook you properly down below, my good friend,
if you don't bring them proper materials?"

Upon which hint men have always acted from the beginning; and as far
as we can trace history back, we find them mixing salt with their food,
though without knowing the real reason why. It is the same, too, with
the lower animals. They know nothing of the matter either, but this
does not prevent their having a natural relish for salt, as any one
will tell you who has the charge of cattle; for their stomachs require
for their cooking the very same seasoning as our own, and therefore
their porter above has received the same orders.

Salt is not the only thing, however, that exists in that liquid in the
stomach. Learned men, after making minute researches, have found in
it another equally powerful material, which is also found in milk.
Therefore cheese, which contains this material as well as salt, is
quite in its place at the end of dinner. It furnishes reinforcements
for the stomach in cooking, and this is why you so often hear people
say that a little cheese helps the digestion.

The _digestion_! Yes, that is the word I ought to have begun with.
It is the real name of all this cooking; an operation after which I
would defy you to recognise the nice little cakes you have eaten, any
better than your mamma can trace her pretty rosy-cheeked apples in the
jelly which she left on the fire two hours ago. The stomach, as you
see, is very busy quite as long a time as that, and if we have to be
very careful (as I pointed out before) not to disturb him too suddenly
in his work after dinner, it is also important that we should not,
while at dinner, give him more work to do than he is capable of doing.
Although he is the master, he is but a puny fellow, as I have already
pointed out; nevertheless, he works conscientiously, because he knows
that the life of the whole body depends upon his exertions. Some people
even say that in spite of his leanness he strips himself, at each
digestion, of his interior skin, which he sacrifices to his work, and
the fragments of which tend to increase and improve the stew which is
entrusted to his care. Think of this, my dear, whenever a greedy fit
comes over you, and recollect that such a disinterested public
functionary deserves some consideration. Besides, there is serious
danger, quite apart from any question of injustice, in overwhelming
him with work. If your legs are wearied out, you have it in your power
to lie in bed. If your arm is in pain, you can keep it at rest. But
your stomach is like those poor people who have to support their
families by the labor of each day. He, too, labors for others: he has
no right to rest, no right to be ill, therefore; and when he begins
to fail, woe betide you--you will have enough of it.

Children who have learnt nothing may laugh at all this, but you, my
dear, are beginning to know something, and "science constrains,"
_i.e._ it has its claims and requirements. It requires you, to-day, not
to be greedy, to-morrow, something else, and so on, continually, until
you have become quite reasonable and wise. I am sorry for you if this
vexes you, but it was your own wish to learn, and _science constrains_.
Indeed, I will whisper to you in confidence that this is the best excuse
people who are unwilling to learn have to offer for refusing. They do
not know what learning may lead to, and what a pity it would be if they
could no longer be greedy, or ill-natured, or selfish. What would become
of us all in such a case?



LETTER IX.

THE STOMACH--_(continued)_.

We made a very long story of the stomach last time, my dear child;
and, after all, I see that there was one thing I forgot to tell
you--viz., what it is like.

Have you ever seen a bagpiper, I wonder? A man who carries under his
arm a kind of large dark brown bag, which he fills with air by blowing
into it, and out of which he presently forces the same air into a
musical pipe by pressing it gently with his elbow. If you never saw
such a thing, it is a pity; first, because the bagpipe was the national
instrument of our ancestors the Gauls, and is religiously preserved
as such by the Scotch Highlanders and the peasants of Brittany--(two
remnants of that illustrious race, whose history I recommend to your
careful perusal some day); secondly, and it is this fact which has the
greatest interest for us just now, because that large bag, which is
the principal part of the instrument, gives you a very exact idea of
your stomach; for in fact it really and truly _is_ a stomach itself, and
moreover, the stomach of an animal whose interior formation resembles
yours very, very much.

And who do you suppose is this audacious animal, which presumes to
have an inside so like that of a pretty little girl? Really, I am half
ashamed to name him, for fear you should be angry with me for doing
so. It is--it is the pig! The resemblance is not exactly a flattering
one to you, perhaps, but we are all alike, and it would be worse than
foolish to grumble at being created as we are. Moreover, there is one
difference; the pig, who thinks of nothing but eating, has a very much
larger stomach than we have, which is some consolation, at any rate.

Place the palm of your right hand on what is called the pit of the
stomach, turning the ends of the fingers towards the heart; your hand
will nearly cover the space usually occupied by the stomach, and you
may figure it to yourself as a rounded and elongated bag, bigger above
than below, making a very decided bend inside as it descends from the
heart downward; something like one of those long French pears, called
"Bon-chretiens," if it were bent in the middle, and the big end of it
were placed next the heart. As for the exact size of the bag, there
is no telling it, for it depends upon circumstances. It is a very
convenient bag in that respect; just such a one as you would like to
have in your frock for a pocket; only there would be a danger of your
being tempted to put too many things into it. For as you fill it, it
expands, and enlarges itself like an indian-rubber ball, which, though
only the size of an egg to begin with, becomes as big as your head if
you blow hard into it. Then, as it gets empty, it recovers itself,
diminishing gradually in size in plait-like contractions.

When people remain too long without eating, they have, as they say,
twinges in the stomach. This is because the stomach, becoming by degrees
quite empty, and contracting more and more, the surrounding parts which
were sustained by it, lose their support, and strain at their ligaments,
which now have all the weight to bear. Careless people, who do not
think of such things, are reminded by the twinging pains that it is
time to eat, just as a careless servant is called to order by the bell
of which his master has pulled the string.

In your case, my dear child, such warnings are soon attended to, and
you have not always even to wait till they come. But there are hundreds
of miserable beings who are warned to no purpose, who cannot obey the
master when he calls for his rations, because they have nothing to
give him; and when this forced disobedience lasts too long, they end
by dying of it. In cases like these, when human beings thus cruelly
perish, the stomach is found to be contracted till it is scarcely
bigger than one's finger.

On the other hand, a man once died suffocated from excess of food,
after one of those great public dinners, which last four, six, or more
hours--one can scarcely say correctly how long--and the doctors who
examined him found his stomach so prodigiously enlarged that it alone
occupied more than one-half of his inside. As you perceive, therefore,
the stomach has, properly speaking, no fixed size. Its size depends
upon what there is in it. It is like those men whose manners go up and
down with their fortunes; who seem very grand people when their pockets
are well filled, but become very small ones when their purses are
empty. There is, nevertheless, this difference between them, that such
men are fools, because they are men, and not _bags_; whereas the
stomach is a sensible bag, fulfilling with intelligence the duties of
its character as a bag. It is very fortunate for us that it is ready
to change its size, according to the caprices of our appetite; and
dressmakers would do well if they could get a hint from it how to
improve their style of pockets, which certainly cannot have cost their
inventors any very great effort of imagination!

The way in which this extraordinary pocket empties itself is not less
curious than the rest. As long as digestion is going on, the stomach
is firmly closed at each end; at the upper one by the last ring of the
_aesophagus_, and at the lower by another ring of the same kind,
only stronger; the watchful guardian of the passage which leads to the
intestines. This ring is called the _pylorus_.

For once, here is a name which agrees with our method of describing
the human machine, and I have much pleasure in translating it to you,
although it is a Greek word. _Pylorus_ is the Greek for a porter;
and our ring is indeed a porter like the one of which we have already
said so much, and which I called last time the _porter up above_,
in anticipation of his colleague below.

The porter up above presides at the entrance; the one below at the
exit, and both for the same purpose, namely, to _taste._ [Footnote:
It would be absurd to say so in the common acceptation of the term;
but according to No. 1 of Mr. Mayo's "Classification of the impressions
produced by substances taken into the fauces," viz., _"Where
sensations of_ touch _alone are produced, as by rock-crystal,
sapphire, or ice,"_ the word taste may be applied to the
discriminating faculty of the _Pylorus_.--TR.]

It may well astonish you, that you should have in your inside a taster
who is not accountable to you; who experiences sensations of which you
know nothing, and cannot even form an idea. Yet thus it is. The
_pylorus_ actually tastes the paste which is in the stomach, and
if it is not to his taste, that is to say, if the work of digestion
has not sufficiently transformed it for use, he keeps the door
relentlessly closed.

The porter up above has a thousand different tastes. He makes his bow
to meringues, and admits wings of chickens. Fries, roasts, stews,
things tender or crisp, sweet and salt, oily, greasy, or sour; amongall
kinds he has friends whom he welcomes in succession; and it is
well for us that he does so, for we share in all his pleasures.

The porter below, who works for himself alone, obscure and unknown
down in his black hole, the porter below, I say, has but one taste,
knows but one friend--a gray-looking paste, semi-liquid, with a very
peculiar unsavoury smell, disagreeable enough to any one but himself,
which is called the _chyme_, I scarcely know why, but it is what
everything one eats turns into, without exception, be it delicate or
coarse by nature. The great lord's truffle-stuffed pullet makes, as
nearly as possible, the same _chyme_ as the charcoal-burner's black
bread; and though the palate of the former may be better treated
than that of the latter, the _pylori_ can enjoy but one and the
selfsame sauce. Equality is soon restored in this case, therefore, as
you see.

To be free to pass through then, the contents of the stomach must be
reduced to the condition of _chyme,_ the only substance which finds
favor with the _pylorus:_ and as, in the endless varieties of food which
go to form our nutriment, some sorts turn into _chyme_ much more quickly
than others, it follows, that by the aid of its discriminating tact
(which is not easy to elude) the _pylorus_ allows some to pass, while it
turns back others, until all in succession are converted into chyme. For
example, in the case of a mouthful of bread and meat swallowed at once,
the bread passes away on its travels long before the meat has done
dancing attendance in the stomach, awaiting that transformation without
which the _pylorus_ will never allow it to slip through.

This ought to make you seriously reflect on the danger of carelessly
swallowing things, which, by their nature, are not susceptible of being
converted into _chyme,_ particularly if they are too large to
hide in the general paste, as a cherry-stone will sometimes do, so
mixed up with other food as to pass unperceived by the _pylorus,_
over whose decisions we have no control, remember. It bangs the door
to, be assured, in the very face of anything obnoxious without
hesitation, and the poor stomach would find itself condemned to retain
them for an indefinite period, unless by dint of prayers and
supplications they should contrive to soften the stern guardian, who
may at last get accustomed to their approach, and, perhaps, in a weak
moment, allow them to pass as contraband goods; like a custom-house
officer on a foreign frontier who will occasionally shut his eyes to
a country friend's packet of tobacco. But the poor stomach has had to
suffer a martyrdom meantime, while the dispute was pending, and before
the intruder has been winked at by the porter.

I shall remember all my life the history of a peach-stone, which was
related to me in 1831. I was at the time a youngster at the Stanislaus
College, and (aided perhaps by the Revolution of July, which had
recently occurred), it was just then discovered to be a proper thing
to set about teaching the laws of nature to children. Consequently,
for the first time in the history of schools, a professor of natural
history was added to the instructors of Latin and Greek. I leave you
to judge how we opened our ears to his lessons. When we arrived in the
course of our new studies at the _pylorus,_ of which we had none
of us ever heard before, our professor, in warning us, as I have done
you, of the dangers of imprudent gluttony, related, as an instance,
the case of a lady who had inadvertently swallowed a peach-stone. For
two years she suffered agonies in her stomach without any cessation
or relief. The luckless peach-stone, repelled by the walls of the
stomach, which its very touch irritated, was incessantly thrown against
the entrance of the _pylorus,_ but in vain. As to turning itself
into _chyme,_ such a thing was not to be thought of, it was far
too hard a substance for that. Round and round it went, causing in its
relentless course such renewed suffering to the poor patient, that she
was visibly sinking from day to day.

The doctors, finding all their treatment of no avail, began to despair
of her life, when one fine day she was suddenly, and as if by
enchantment, relieved of her tormentor. The peach-stone had bribed the
porter, with whom, in the course of the two years, it had scraped up
a sort of friendship. It had cleared the terrible barrier, had been
allowed to slip out, and the lady was saved; but it was only just in
time.

I do not know, my dear, that this story, which is certainly well
calculated to cure you of any fancy for swallowing peach-stones,
willmake as much impression on you as it did on me five-and-twenty years
ago. The idea of telling it to you occurred to me quite by chance. It
has carried me back to the time when, as is now the case with you, the
mysteries which lie hidden in our internal organization were beginning
to be revealed to my mind; and you will one day know with what delight
one recalls the remembrance of these first dawnings of the intellectual
life--that delightful infancy of the growing mind--more rich in
recollections, and more interesting a thousand fold than the infancy
of the body. I have allowed myself the little treat of this episode,
and if I have had the good fortune to amuse you at all during our
progress, you must not cavil at this piece of self-indulgence.
And now we have done just what the peach-stone did; we, too, have
passed the barrier, and are out of the stomach, but still we have not
yet come to the end of our tale.



LETTER X.

THE INTESTINAL CANAL.

I venture to hope, my dear child, that more and more light is dawning
upon your mind, as we gradually proceed on our little journey. You
must by this time have some idea how the food, which has been masticated
and softened in the mouth, cooked, kneaded, and decomposed in the
stomach, and transformed into a soft, semi-transparent kind of paste,
will soon be ready to mix with the blood, in order to repair the waste
that the life-stream is continually undergoing in its ceaseless course
through all parts of the body.

You have perhaps thought it a sad degradation for a truffle-stuffed
fowl to turn to _chyme._ But when you consider that by this means
it becomes part and parcel of a human body, the change is not to be
despised. It was necessary, to begin with, that materials destined to
the honor of being incorporated into our frame, should break the links
which bound them to the condition of fowl and vegetable, and thus be
free to engage in new relations; just as a man who wishes to be
naturalized in a new country must first break the ties which hold him
to the old one. Those articles of food we were speaking of lately,
which are so stiff and ceremonious, and want so much coaxing before
they change into _chyme,_ which, moreover, we call _indigestible_
because they tire the stomach so much more than the rest, are merely
those whose component parts being held together by more solid ties than
usual, continue obstinately in the same state as at first, and will not
consent to that dissolution which is the first condition of their
glorious transformation.

Moreover, the transformation which has been described to you now, you
will henceforth meet with everywhere; wherever, that is to say, and
as far as, you choose to pursue the study of nature. God works by one
grand and simple rule so far as we can discover. He destroys to
reconstruct, builds up what is to be, out of the ruins of what has
been, creates life by death, if I may so express myself, and thus,
what takes place in our stomachs on a small scale goes on on a large
one in the universe.

Social communities, like everything else, are subject to this universal
law, and it is not always an advantage to them when they refuse to be
digested in the great stomach of the age!

While we are on this subject, and to show you how wonderfully this
little history of eating, told in this familiar style, applies right
and left, let us reflect on the causes which have produced a great and
mighty nation in one country (as in France), while in another (as in.
Germany), a far more numerous and even more intellectual population
has failed to rise to anything like the same distinction. The
explanation is not difficult. In the one case, the petty tribes among
which the land was originally divided consented to mix, and dissolve,
and be digested as it were together, in order to revive again for a
more glorious career; while in the other, the aboriginal societies
have adhered stiffly to their distinctive characters, and failing to
submit to the regenerating process, cling together in indigested
portions, rather than assimilate into one great whole.

However, we must return to the _pylorus_ or we shall be getting
into a difficulty! What I am now going to offer you though, is rather
hard of digestion, but it will not do to provide sweet pastry only for
your brain; it will be more wholesome for it to have something a little
more solid to bite at from time to time.

The _pylorus_, then, as has been shown, makes way for all sorts
of aliments when they have been converted into _chyme; i.e._,
when they have lost their original form and individuality. They are
dead to their first life, therefore; now the question is, how are they
to be revived into the new one?

Behind the _pylorus_ extends a long conduit or tube--so long as to be
sometimes seven times the length of the whole body, but doubled up
backwards and forwards a number of times, so as to form a large bundle,
which fills the whole cavity of the belly--or as we also call it, the
_abdomen_. This bundle or packet is known to everybody as _the
intestines_, and it is divided into two portions: the _small
intestine_--that is, the slenderer, finer portion which begins at the
_pylorus_, and forms all the doublings of the packet, and the _large
intestine_, which is shorter and thicker also, as its name implies, and
keeps to some extent separate, though it is in reality only a
continuation of the other. This starts at the base of the _abdomen_,
near the right side, goes up in a straight line to the height of the
stomach, below which it passes, making a large bend in front of the
small intestine; after which it descends on the left side to the lower
part of the trunk, where it terminates.

You will perhaps inquire how the _chyme_ continues to make its way
through all these manifold twists of the intestines; but do not trouble
yourself; it has only to let itself go. That _vermicular movement_ which
we noticed in the _oesophagus_ and in the _stomach_ is found here also.
It reigns, so to speak, from one end of our internal eating-machine to
the other; which eating-machine, by the way, we will now call by its
proper scientific name--_the intestinal canal_; and it is by that
movement the food is carried forward from the first moment it leaves the
mouth, and helped through all its journeyings, till it reaches the
termination of the large intestine.

If your body were made of glass, so that you could look through it to
watch the intestine at work, it would appear to you like an enormous
worm coiled up into a bundle, heaving and moving with all its rings
at once. You never suspected there was such a movement within you; yet
it has been going on there continually ever since you were born, and
will not cease till you die. Your internal machinery never goes to
sleep, not even when you are sleeping yourself. It is a workshop in
constant operation, providing night and day for your necessities; and
in this respect the inner man sets a first-rate example to the outer
one! You will recollect what I said to you the other day about the
internal republic, and the provinces which are under your sole
government. It would be very disgraceful for the kingdom to be doing
nothing while the republic is working so hard; and a queen who
understands her office will make it a point of honor to banish idleness
from her household; in the houses of her neighbors this word is unknown.

The _chyme_ once launched into this moving tube, is in no danger
of remaining stationary there; the fear is, of its passing on too
quickly, as you will soon see. But this danger has been provided
against. Along the whole course of its journey, though chiefly at the
commencement, it encounters at intervals certain elastic fleshy valves
which interrupt its progress, and do not allow it to pass till it has
accumulated in sufficient force to push them before it, and so escape.
In consequence of which it is always being checked in its advance; and
during these stoppages a most important work goes on upon it at leisure.

You must understand first, that the substances of which our food is
composed, and which are afterwards decomposed in the stomach, are not
all invited to enter the blood. Our aliments are something like the
stones which the gold-seekers of California reduce to powder in order
to extract therefrom the hidden particles of gold they contain. The
gold of our food is that portion of it which the blood is able to
appropriate to his own advantage; the rest he rejects as refuse. And
this explains why a small slice of meat nourishes you more than a whole
plateful of salad. Meat is a stone absolutely full of gold, while the
salad has only a few veins of it here and there, and by far the greater
part of the material it sends to the intestines, has, in consequence,
to be thrown away.

Now it is in the first portion of the small intestine, the part known
by the Latin name _duodenum,_ which signifies twelve (because it
is about the length of twelve finger-breadths), that the division takes
place between the parts which go to nourish the blood, and those which
are useless refuse. It is an important operation as you may suppose,
and were the _chyme_ to pass rapidly through the small intestine
the gold would run the risk of being carried off with the refuse.

After the delay in the stomach, the food-substances make another halt
in the _duodenum,_ which, being very thin and slender, would have
great difficulty in containing them at the time of their grand entry,
an hour or two after a meal, were it not that it possesses the property
of expanding itself to such an extent, that it swells out on grand
occasions to the usual size of the stomach itself, so that it has
sometimes been considered as a second stomach. And no doubt the
operation which takes place in it gives it a claim to the appellation,
for thereby the finishing stroke is put to the work previously begun
in the stomach, and one may fairly say that, but for this last touch,
very little would be accomplished at all.

Above the _duodenum_, and hid behind the stomach, is a kind of sponge,
similar in nature to those we have already observed in the mouth. To
this has been given the somewhat ridiculous name of _pancreas_; I call
it ridiculous because it is derived from two Greek words which signify
_all flesh_; whereas the _pancreas_, which is a sponge of the same
description as the salivary glands, presents the appearance of a grayish
granulous mass which is not fleshy at all. Whatever be its name,
however, our sponge communicates with the _duodenum_ through a small
tube, by means of which it pours into the _chyme_, as it accumulates, a
copious supply of a fluid exactly like the _saliva_ of the mouth.

Just by the place where the tube from the _pancreas_ empties itself into
the _duodenum_, another tube arrives bringing also a fluid, but of a
different sort. This last comes from the liver, where there is a
manufactory of _bile_--an unpleasant yellowish-green liquid, the name of
which you have no doubt heard before, and which plays a very important
part in the transformation of the aliments.

These new agents, the bile and the liver, are far too important to be
passed over in a few words; I reserve them, therefore, for my next
letter. Meantime, not to leave you longer in suspense, I may say that
the separation between the gold and the refuse in the _chyme_ takes
place as soon as the latter has received the two liquids furnished
by the liver and the _pancreas_. If you ask in what manner the
division is accomplished, I confess, to my shame, that I am not able
to explain it! What takes place there is a chemical process, and
hereafter I shall have occasion to explain the meaning of that phrase.
But the Great Chemist has not in this instance seen fit to divulge to
man the secret of the work.

Indeed, you must prepare yourself beforehand, my dear child, to meet
with many other mysteries besides this, if we pursue to the end our
study of this flesh and bone which constitute the body of man. And
here I recall what Camille Desmoulins is reported to have said about
St. Just, viz., that he carried his head as high as if it were a
consecrated Host.

[Footnote: The young Protestant reader who has never lived
in a Catholic country, will perhaps need to be told, that what
is here called Consecrated Host, is the sacramental wafer, or communion
bread of the church. In French called _hostie_, in Italian, _ostia_.

In all their religious processions, which are very frequent, the host
is carried by the priest highest in authority, in a glass box placed
on a staff about four feet long, which he holds before him and so far
elevated that he has to look up to it. Over his head a richly
embroidered canopy of satin is always carried by several men; and while
these are passing, all good Catholics uncover the head and bend the
knee, wherever they may be.

It is the custom also for the priest to be called to administer the
sacrament to any one about to die, on which occasion he always walks
under this canopy, dressed in his priestly robes, carrying the host
and preceded by some boys, ringing a bell, when the same ceremony is
observed. In passing a regiment or company of soldiers, the column is
halted, wheeled into line, and with arms presented, the whole line,
officers and men, kneel before it, and the priest usually turns and
offers a benediction. When he goes in the evening to the house of the
dying, it is customary for the people to go out upon the balconies
with lighted lamps and kneel while the host is being carried by.]

You will read about these two men by-and-by in history. Meantime I
will not bid you do exactly the same as St. Just, because you would be
laughed at; but in one point of view he was not altogether wrong. The
human body is, in very truth, a temple in which the Deity maybe said
to reside, not inactively, not veiling his presence, but living and
moving unceasingly, watching on our behalf over the mysterious
accomplishment of the everlasting laws which equally guide the
_chyme_ in its workings through our frames, and direct the sun
in its course through the heavens. We mortals eat, but it is God who
brings nourishment out of our food.



LETTER XI.

THE LIVER.

I fear you will be getting a little weary, my dear, of dwelling so long
on this intestinal tube, where things which looked so well on one's
plate become so transformed that they cannot be recognized, and where
there is nothing to talk about but _chyme_, and _bile_, and the
_pancreas,_ and all sorts of things neither pleasant to the eye nor
agreeable to the ear.

But what is to be done? It is always the same story with useful things.
The people by whose labor you live in this world, are by no means the
handsomest to look at, and so it is in the little world we carry about
in our bodies.

Never mind! Keep up your heart. We are getting to the end. We shall
very soon be following the nourishing portion of our food, on its
journey to the blood, and you will find yourself in new scenes.

First, though, let us say a few words about the liver--the
bile-manufacturer; and to begin with, I will describe the place he
occupies in our interior.

The interior of the human body is divided into two large compartments,
placed one above the other; the _chest_ and the _abdomen_. These are two
distinct apartments, each containing its own particular class of
tenants: the upper one being occupied by the heart and the lungs (the
respective offices of which I will presently explain to you); while in
the lower are the stomach, the intestines, and all the other machinery
which assists in the process of digestion. These two stories of
apartments are separated as those of our houses are, by a floor placed
just above the pit of the stomach. This floor is a large thin, flat
muscle, stretched like canvas, right across the body; and it is called
the _diaphragm_--another hard word! Never mind; but do your best to
recollect it, for we shall have great need of it when we come to the
lungs. If you had been born in Greece, you would have no difficulty with
the word, for it is Greek for _separation_. It means, in fact, a
_separating partition_, or, as I called it just now, _a floor._ All this
is preparatory to telling you that the liver is hooked to the diaphragm
in the abdomen. It is a very large mass and fills up, by itself alone,
all the right side of the lower compartment, from the top downwards, to
where the bones end which protect the abdomen on each side, and which
are called _the short ribs._ Place your hand there, and you will find
them without difficulty.

Large as the liver is, it hangs suspended to a mere point of the
diaphragm, and shakes about with even the slightest movement of the
body. It is partly on this account that many people do not like to
sleep lying on the left side, especially after a good dinner, because
in this position the liver weighs upon and oppresses the stomach, like
a stout gentleman asleep in a coach who falls upon and crushes his
companion at every jolt of the vehicle. The liver within you produces,
then, the same effect that a cat, lying on the pit of your stomach
would do, and the result is that you have the nightmare.

The liver is of a deep-red color. It is an accumulation of excessively
minute atoms, which, when united, form a somewhat compact mass, and
within each of which there is a little cell, invisible to the naked
eye, where an operation of the highest importance to our existence is
mysteriously carried on. It appears a very simple one, it is true, yet
hitherto it has baffled all attempts at explanation. Listen, however;
the subject is well worthy your careful attention, whether it can be
explained or not, and we must look back to take it up from thebeginning.

I told you about the thousand workmen constantly busied in every part
of our bodies, who call on the blood without ceasing for "more, more."
You will remember further that it is to enable the blood to supply
these constant demands, that we require food.

This being understood, it is not difficult to see why we grow; the
difficulty is, rather, to explain why we do not continue to grow.

Consider, for instance, the quantity of food you have eaten during the
last year. Picture to yourself all the bread, meat, vegetables, fruits,
cakes, &c., piled upon a table. Put a whole year's milk into a large
earthenware pan, all the sweetmeats into a large jar, all the soup
into a great tureen, and see what a huge heap you will have collected
together. Then try to recollect how much you have increased in size
with all this nourishment, which has entered your body. But reckoning
in this way--even supposing the little workmen had used only a half
or even a third of the materials in question, and rejected the rest
as refuse--you would have to stoop in order to get in at the door; and
as for your papa, whose heap must have been bigger than yours, his
case would be desperate indeed; and yet he has not grown at all!

This is very curious, and I dare say you have never thought about it
before.

Do you know the story of a certain lady called Penelope, who was the
wife of Ulysses, a very celebrated king of whom the world has talked
for the last 3000 years--thanks to a poet called Homer, who did him
the honor of making him his hero! The husband of Penelope had left her
for a long time to go to the wars, and as he did not return, people
tried to persuade her to marry again. For peace and quiet's sake, she
promised to do so when she should have finished a piece of cloth she
was weaving, at which she worked all day long. They thought to get
hold of her very soon, but her importunate lovers were disappointed;
for the faithful wife, determined to await the return of her husband,
unwove every night the portion she had woven during the day; and I
leave you to judge what progress the web made in the course of a year!

Now, every part of our bodies is a kind of Penelope's web, with this
difference--that here the web unravels at one end as fast as the work
progresses at the other. As the little masons put new bricks to the
house on one side, the old ones crumble away on another--in this manner
the work might go on forever without the house becoming bigger; while,
on the other hand, the house is always being rebuilt. People who are
fond of building, as some are, would quite enjoy having such a mansion
as this on hand!

At your early age, my love, fewer bricks drop out than are added, and
this is why you grow from year to year. At your papa's age, just the
same number perish and are replaced; and therefore he continues the
same size, although in the course of the year he swallows three times
his own weight of food. But when I say this, do not suppose it is an
offensive remark, or that I think him either too little a man, or too
great an eater; seeing that there are 365 days in the year, and that
a quart of water weighs two pounds: I need not say more!

But the next question is, what becomes of all the refuse which this
perpetual destruction produces?

What becomes of it? Have you forgotten our steward who looks after
everything? He is a more active fellow than I have represented him!
To the office of purveyor-general he adds that of universal scavenger.
But in the latter department he obtains help. Wherever he passes along,
troops of little scavengers press forward, like himself always busy;
and while he holds out a new brick to the mason as he hurries by, the
little scavenger slips out the old one and conveys it away. The history
of these scavengers is a very curious one, and we shall have to speak
about it a little further on. They are minute pipes, _i.e. ducts_,
spread all over the body, which they envelope as if with fine net work.
They all communicate together, and end by emptying the whole of their
contents into one large canal, which, in its turn, empties itself into
the great stream of the blood. Imagine all the drains of a great town
flowing into one large one, which should empty itself into the river
on which the town was built, and you will have a fair idea of the whole
transaction. What the river would in such a case be to the town, the
blood is to the body--the universal scavenger, as I said before. But
you will ask further, What does the blood do with all this?--a question
which brings us back once more to the liver.

You must have seen, just now, that the pockets of our dear steward
would be rapidly overloaded, were he to keep constantly filling them
with the old worn-out materials which the builders rejected, unless
he had some means of emptying them as he went along. Accordingly, a
wise Providence has furnished the body, on all sides, with clusters
of small chambers or cells, in which the blood deposits, as he goes
by, all the refuse he has picked up, and which makes its exit from the
body sometimes in one way, sometimes in another. Now, the cells of the
liver are among these refuse-chambers. One may even consider them as
some of the most important ones. When the blood has run its course
through the lower compartment, I mean the _abdomen_, it collects
from all directions and rushes into a large canal called the _portal
vein_, which conveys it to the liver. As soon as this canal has
entered the liver, it divides and subdivides itself in every direction,
like the limbs and branches of a tree diverging from the trunk; and
very soon the blood finds itself disseminating through an infinity of
small canals or pipes, whose ultimate extremities, a thousand times
finer than the finest hairs of your head, communicate with the tiny
cells of the liver. There, each of the imperceptible little drops,
thus carried into these imperceptibly minute cell-chambers, rids
itself--but no one knows how--of a part of the sweepings it has carried
along with it. Which done, the little drops thread their way back
through other canals as fine as the first, and which go on uniting
more and more to each other, like the branches of a tree on their way
to the trunk--forming at last one large canal, through which the blood
escapes from the liver, once more relieved from its weight of rubbish,
and ready to recommence its work.

You are going to ask me, "What is all this to me--this history of the
blood and its sweepings? It was the bile you undertook to tell me
about, that liquid you spoke of as so necessary for the transformation
of the food: we were to get out of the intestinal tubes by the help
of the bile, you promised me."

Well, my little impatient minx, it is the history of the bile that I
have been relating to you, and what is most remarkable about it is
this. You have perhaps heard of those wholesale ragpickers, who
makelarge fortunes by collecting out of the mud and dirt of the streets,
the many valuable things which have been dropped there? Well, the liver
is the master-ragpicker of the body. He fabricates, out of the refuse
of the blood, that bile which is so valuable in the economy of the
human frame. This bile is neither more nor less than the deposit left
by the little drops of blood in the innumerable minute liver-cells.
See what an ingenious arrangement, and in what a simple way two objects
are effected by one operation!

Now you have learnt the genealogy of the bile, and the double office
of the liver, which benefits the blood by what it takes from it,
benefits the _chyme_ by what it gives it, and is an economist at
the same time--since it only gives back what it has received. This was
what I particularly wished to explain to you: the rest you will easily
learn.

The bile does not make a long stay in the little cells, it also escapes,
by canals similar to those which carry off the blood, after
itspurification; and which in a similar way unite by degrees together,
until at length they terminate in a single canal, communicating with
a little bag placed close against the liver, where the bile accumulates
between the periods of digestion--so forming a stock on hand, ready
to pour at once into the _duodenum_ when the latter calls for its
assistance. The next time the cook cleans out a fowl, ask her to show
you the little greenish bladder which she calls the gall and which she
takes such care not to burst, because it contains a bitter liquid
which, if spilt upon it, would quite ruin the flavor of the fowl. Such,
precisely, is the bag which holds the bile. Moreover, it is close by
the liver of the fowl that you will find it placed: and you can convince
yourself in a moment by it, that the little provision I tell you of
is always stored away therein.

We have also within us a multitude of minute electric telegraphs, which
transmit intelligence of all that occurs from one part of the body to
another, in a more wonderful manner even than the telegraphs of man's
making; later we shall see how they work. By their means the little
bag by the liver is made aware in the twinkling of an eye of the
entrance of the _chyme_ into the _duodenum,_ and forthwith the bile
returns for some distance by the canal which brought it, and then
branches off into a larger one which opens into the _duodenum._

The liver, on getting this intelligence, sets to work more diligently
than ever, and the bile flows in streams into the _duodenum,_ where it
mixes as it arrives with the current which comes from the _pancreas._
Thus combined, the two liquids flow over the _chyme,_ which they
saturate on all sides; and here, as I have said, the work of the
intestinal canal ends. What is serviceable for the blood is separated
from the useless refuse, and nothing remains but to get it out of the
intestines. It is true that in their character of tubes these are closed
on all sides. But do not trouble yourself: a means of escape is
prepared.

Before we part, however, I must apologize for something. I have not
described to you what the bile consists of, or what kind of refuse the
blood leaves in the liver; nevertheless, as you take an interest in
this much-neglected book of nature, you ought to know these things.

It is, however, very difficult to lead you by the hand through so many
wonder*, where the secrets of nature are all in operation at once, and
to explain each as soon as we meet with it. They combine, and progress
together like the waves of the sea, where one breath suffices to agitate
the whole mass.

When we have talked about the lungs, we will have another word to say
about the liver.



LETTER XII. THE CHYLE.

To-day we have to begin by making acquaintance with a new term. I would
willingly have spared you this, if I could, for the word is neither
a pretty, nor a well-chosen one, but we cannot get on without it.

You are aware now that the learned, unknown sponsors, who gave names
to the different parts of the body, bestowed the odd-enough one of
_chyme_ on that pasty substance which passes out of the stomach when the
cooking is over. We have said quite enough about it, and you know enough
of it I am sure. Well! the people seem to have had quite a fancy for the
word _chyme_, for they adopted it again, with only a very slight
alteration, when they wanted to specify separately the quintessence of
the _chyme_ (the useful part that is), which has to unite with the
blood, and which we have been speaking of as the _gold_ of the
aliments--this then they called _chyle_. I give you the name as I
received it, but have no responsibility in the matter.

In concluding the last chapter I said we were sure to find there was
a plan for extracting the best part of the _chyme_, viz. the _chyle_,
from the intestinal canal; and a very simple one it is. A complete
regiment of those little scavengers lately described, are drawn up in
battle-array along the whole length of the small intestine, but
especially round about the _duodenum._ There, a thousand minute pipes
pierce in all directions through the coat of the intestine, and suck,
like so many constantly open mouths, the drops of _chyle_ as fast as
they are formed. They are called _chyliferous vessels_ or chyle-bearers,
just as we might call hot-air stoves _caloriferous_ or heat-bearers--from
the Latin word _fero,_ which means to carry or bear. I mentioned
before that there were, within the intestine, certain elastic valves
which obstruct the progress of the _chyme,_ and oblige it to be
constantly stopping. There are in fact so many of these, and the skin
which lines the intestinal canal is so folded and plaited, that if it
were stretched out at full length on a big table, it would cover at
least as large a surface as that other skin, with which you are so well
acquainted, which entirely clothes the body outside.

Now, the _chyliferous vessels_ we have been speaking of insinuate
themselves into all the plaits and folds alluded to, and thus they
reach at last the very centre of the _chymous_ paste, and not a single
drop of _chyle_ can escape them. They do their work so well, that the
separation is effected long before the paste reaches the large
intestine; and when that has forced its way through the door which
guards the entrance, and which prevents its ever returning again, the
_chyle_ is already far off on its mission. It has threaded its way along
the little pipes, and, always creeping nearer and nearer, is on the
high-road to the heart, where it is anxiously expected.

And what becomes of the rest? There is nothing further to be said about
it, but that it shares the fate of everything else which, having
answered its purpose in its place, is no longer wanted and must be got
rid of. Thus in works where iron-stone smelting is carried on, the
refuse that remains after the ore is extracted, though available for
road-making or other purposes, is thrown out of the manufactory as a
useless incumbrance there.

Our history requires us to follow the fate of that golden aliment the
_chyle,_ which is now in a condition to support the life of the body,
and every drop of which will turn into blood--the blood which beats at
our hearts, nourishes our limbs, and sets at work the fibres of our
brain.

I ought to tell you first that the _chyle,_ when it leaves the
intestine, is very like milk. It is a white, rather fatty juice, having
the appearance, when you look closely at it, of a kind of _whey,_
in which a crowd of globules, or little balls if you prefer it,
infinitesimally small, are swimming about. Some people, whose curiosity
nothing can check, have put the tips of their tongue to it; so I am
able to tell you, if you care for the information, that it has rather
a saltish taste.

At this point it is what may be called new-born blood, and to carry
on the metaphor, blood whose education has yet to be completed. All
the elements of blood are there already, but in confusion and
intermingled, so that they cannot yet be recognised. A wonderful fact,
and one of which I have no explanation to offer you, because among the
many mysteries which are silently going on within us is this, that the
education of the new-born blood begins entirely of itself in the vessels
which are carrying it along. During their very journey, the confused
elements are setting themselves in order and forming into groups. In
short the _chyle,_ when it comes out of the chyliferous vessels,
is already much more like blood than when it entered them, and yet one
cannot account for the change. It is changed, however; its whiteness
has already assumed a rosy tinge, and if it is exposed to the air it
may be seen turning slightly red, as if to give notice to the observer
of what it is about to become.

You know that all our scavengers uniting together deposit their
sweepings in one large canal, which is called the _thoracic duct._
The _chyle_ scavengers arrive there just like the rest, and there
our poor friend finds himself confounded for a moment with all the
dross of the body, as sometimes happens to men who devote themselves
to the public good. But the crisis passes in an instant. A little
further off, the _thoracic duct_ pours its whole contents together
into a large vein situated close to the heart, and the blood has no
difficulty in recognising and appropriating what belongs to him.

Here, my dear little scholar, we conclude the first part of our story.
To eat is to nourish oneself; that is, to furnish all parts of the
body with the substances necessary to them for the proper performance
of their functions. The mouth receives these substances in their crude
condition, the intestinal canal prepares them for use, and the blood
distributes them.

After the history of the _preparation,_ comes naturally that of the
_distribution._

The first is called the DIGESTION. It is the history of the _chyle,_
which begins between the thumb and forefinger while as yet invisible,
hid in the thousand prisons of our different sorts of food, and ends in
the _thoracic duct_, when, disengaged from all previous bonds, purified
and refined by the ordeals of its intestinal life, it leaps into the
blood, carrying with it a renewal of life and power.

The second history is that of the CIRCULATION. It is the history of
the _Blood,_ that indefatigable traveler, who is constantly
_circulating_ or describing a circle (the Latins called it _circulus_)
through the body; by which I mean that it is continually retracing its
steps, coming out of the heart to return to it, re-entering it only to
leave it again, and so on without intermission, until the hour of death.

The history of the _Digestion_, which we have just gone through,
goes on quietly from one end to the other without any complication.

That of the _Circulation_, which we are about to begin, is mixed
up with another history, from which it cannot be kept separate while
the description is going on, although the two histories are in reality
quite distinct from each other. The blood describes two circles, to
speak correctly: 1st. A wide one, which extends from the extremities
of the body to the heart, and back again from the heart to the
extremities. 2d. A more contracted one, which goes from the heart to
the lungs, and back from the lungs to the heart. Whilst circulating
in the lungs, it encounters the air we breathe; and here takes place,
between it and the air, one of the most curious transactions imaginable,
without which the blood would not be able to nourish the body even for
five minutes. This is called RESPIRATION, or the act of breathing.

Digestion, circulation, respiration, the three histories together form
but one--that of NUTRITION, or the act of nourishing; in other words,
of supporting life. This is what I called _eating_ at first, that
I might not mystify you at the beginning with hard words. But now that
we are growing learned ourselves, we must accustom ourselves to the
terms in use among learned people, especially when they are not more
formidable than those I have just taught you.

Our next subject for consideration, then, Will be the circulation; and
we will begin with the heart, since that is to the circulation what
the stomach is to the digestion--viz., master of the establishment.
He is a very important person, this heart, as I hardly need tell you.
Even ignorant people speak respectfully of him, and I am sure beforehand
that his history will interest you very much.

Do you feel as I do, my dear child? I am quite happy at having brought
you thus far on our journey, and at being able to take a rest with you
at the gateway of the new country into which we are about to enter,
like travelers sitting down upon a boundary frontier. What a distance
we have come, since the day when I took you by the hand to conduct you
inside this little body, of which you were making use without knowing
anything about it! How many things we have learned already, and how
many more remain to be learned, of which you have at present no idea!
I assure you I should be almost afraid myself of what is before us
yet, if I did not rely upon my own strong desire to instruct you, and
the tender affection I bear to you. Believe me, the greatest of
constraining powers is love; and when I get bewildered in the midst
of some difficult explanation which will not come out clearly, I have
only to place before me those laughing eyes of yours, where sleeps a
soul that must soon awaken to consciousness, in order to make the
daylight come into my own!

Must I add, too, that I am not working for you only? We are all placed
in this world to help each other, and in striving to bring down light
into your intellect, and good sentiments into your heart, I am thinking
also of those to whom you, in your turn, may render the same good
service hereafter, provided I have the happiness of succeeding now
with you. This ought to be so, ought it not? You should resolve to be
numbered one day among those who have not lived altogether for
themselves, but who have given the world something worth having as
they passed through it. To-day's labor will have been well employed
if, later on, it turns out that this history of the _chyle_ has
not been told you in vain!



LETTER XIII.

THE HEART.

There was once upon a time a banker, a millionaire, who could reckon
his wealth not by millions only, but by hundreds of millions and more;
who was, in fact, so tremendously rich that he did not know what to
do with his money--a difficulty in which nobody had ever been before.

This man took it into his head to build a palace infinitely superior
to anything that had hitherto been seen. Marbles, carpets, gildings,
silk hangings, pictures, and statues--in fact, the whole mass of
common-place luxuries as one sees them even in the grandest royal
abodes, fell short of his magnificent pretensions. He was an intelligent
man, and thoroughly understood the respect due to his riches; and the
common fate of kings seemed to him far too shabby for the entertainment
of his dynasty, which he looked upon as very superior to all the
families of crowned heads in the world. In consequence he sent to the
four quarters of the globe for the most illustrious professors, the
most skilful engineers, the cleverest and most ingenious workmen in
every department; and giving them unlimited permission as to
expenditure? ordered them to adorn his palace with all the wonders of
science and human industry.

Science, and human industry, and unlimited means--what will they not
accomplish? No wonder that nothing was talked of for a hundred miles
around but the magic building--of which, by the way, I do not venture
to give you a description, because it would carry me too far away. Let
it suffice to say, that never Emperor of China, Caliph of Bagdad, or
Great Mogul had such a habitation as our banker, and for a very good
reason--he was twenty times as rich as any such gentry as I have named
ever were in their lives.

When all was finished one trifling flaw was discovered: the place was
not supplied with water. A spring-seeker, who was summoned to the
premises, could only discover a small subterranean watercourse, a sort
of zigzag pipe, formed by nature, between two beds of clay, in which
the rain of the neighborhood collected as in a sort of reservoir. The
water was neither very clear nor very plentiful, as you may imagine;
and the professor appointed to examine it, having begun by tasting it,
made a horrible face, and declared there was no use in proceeding any
further; for it had a stagnant flavor which would not be agreeable to
my lord.

To the amazement of every body, my lord jumped for joy when he heard
this unpleasant news. It was proposed to him to fetch water from a
river which flowed a few miles' distance off; but he would hear of
nothing of the sort. What he wanted was something new, unexpected,
impossible--that was his object throughout. He took a pen and drew up
at a sitting the following programme, which caused our poor professors
to open their eyes in dismay:--

1st. We will use the water on the premises.

2ndly. It shall flow night day and in all parts of the palace at once.

3rdly. There shall be plenty of it, and it shall be good.

The professors looked at each other for some time without speaking,
and the gravest of them, whose fortunes and characters had been long
ago established, suggested that they should simply give my lord and
his money the slip, and so teach him to make fools of people another
time!

But the youngsters, less easily discouraged, cried out against this
with one accord. They declared that the honor of science was at stake,
and that they ought to return impudence for impudence, by executing
to the letter the impertinent programme! At length, after much
discussion and many propositions made against all hope, and thrown
aside one after the other as impracticable, a sudden inspiration crossed
the brain of an engineer who had not yet spoken; and the following is
what he proposed:--

What prevented the water from being sweet and fit to drink, was the
want of movement and air. What had to be done, therefore, was to erect
a pump, but a pump provided with numberless small pipes, extending to
the watercourse in all directions, and so arranged that by means of
them it should be able to draw up the water from all the corners and
windings where it lay stagnating, and then forcing it forward into a
pipe terminating in a rose, like that of a watering-pot, whence it
should gush out to fall down in fine rain, into a reservoir in the
open air. From thence another action of the pump was to bring it back
well aerated, to send it once more into a large pipe with numerous
lesser ramifications, which should convey it into every corner of the
palace.

Up to this point all seemed practicable, but the hardest part had not
yet come. The great difficulty was how to supply this enormous
consumption with so slender a runnel of water as the one at their
disposal. But our engineer had provided for this by a stroke of genius.

Under each of the taps (always kept open), which were dispersed all
over the palace, he would place a small cistern, from the bottom of
which should go a pipe communicating with the body of the force-pump
which drew up the water from the original watercourse. By which means
the water which ran from the taps would be taken up again and go back
to feed the reservoir in the open air; whence it would again return
to supply the taps; and so on and on, the same water continually keeping
the game alive, as people call it. Have you not sometimes seen at a
circus or theatre a large army represented by a hundred supernumeraries,
who file in close columns before the audience, going out at one side
of the stage and coming in at the other, following close at each other's
heels indefinitely? By a similar artifice the engineer would change
his meagre little runnel into an inexhaustible fountain. The water
drawn up from the watercourse by each stroke of the pump would fully
compensate for what was used in its passage through the palace by the
inhabitants. Lastly, as it might sometimes happen that the said
inhabitants washed their hands under the taps, the water on its return
to the cisterns, was to pass through a series of small filters, in
order to cleanse it from any impurity it might have contracted by the
way. Always flowing, always limpid, it would soon lose every trace of
its original source, and might defy comparison with the water of any
river in the world!

A unanimous buzz of congratulations welcomed this plan, at once so
simple and so bold, and our professors thought their troubles were
over, but they were not at the end of their difficulties yet. When it
came to the actual erection of the machine, (naturally a most
complicated one, as it had to set a-going a quintuple system of
pipes--pipes from the water-course to the pump, pipes from the pump
to the reservoir, pipes from the reservoir to the pump, from the pump
to the taps, and from the taps to the pump again,)--our banker, who
had got amused and excited as they went on, conducted them to a small
dark closet, only a few square feet in size, concealed in a corner of
the large apartments, and informed them with a laugh that he had no
other place to offer them. Besides which, he made them understand that
on account of its situation, there could be no question of furnaces
or boilers being set up there (he detested equally coal-smoke, fires,
and explosions)--nor of workmen employed about the machine (it would
not be decent to have them going up and down the front staircase)--nor
above all, of the frightful brake-wheels always screeching and
grinding, the unwieldy pistons rising and falling with a noise
sufficient to give one the headache. He himself slept near the little
dark closet, and the slightest noise was fatal to his repose. Having
explained all this, the rich man curtly made his bow and retired.

For once our professors owned themselves beaten. They had come forward
quite proud of their invention, and now they were received, not with
ecstasies of delight, but with fresh demands, more ridiculous even
than the first. They were decidedly being mystified, and were preparing
in consequence to pack up and begone, furious, and swearing by all
their gods that they would never again expose science to see itself
disgraced by a purse-proud vulgarian's scorn; when, lo! happily, a
good fairy, the special friend of learned men, came passing by that
way. She raised her enchanted wand with the tip of her finger, and all
at once a little girl dressed in rags appeared in the midst of our
astonished professors. Without giving them time to recover themselves,
the child put her hand into the little patched waist of her dress, and
drew forth a rounded object, about the size of her closed fist from
which hung a quantity of tubes spreading in all directions.

"See!" cried she; "here is the machine your banker demands of you."

Picture to yourself a small closed bag, narrowing to a point at the
end, and separated within into two very distinct compartments by a
fleshy partition which went across the inside from the top to the
bottom. Such was the object held up by the little girl. Prom each of
these compartments issued a thick tube, ramifying into endless smaller
ones; and they were moreover each surmounted by a sort of pouch, into
which ran another tube, of the same description as the first. Each of
these four portions (the two compartments and their pouches) was in
constant but independent motion, distending and contracting alternately;
and by carefully examining the noiseless play of this singular machine,
(the walls of which were, by the magic power of the fairy, rendered
transparent to the bystanders,) the learned assembly were very soon
enabled to convince themselves, that it fulfilled all the
monstrousconditions exacted of them by the fantastic millionaire.

All was in movement together, I told you; but let us begin at one end.
The right-hand compartment and its pouch represented the first pump;
the pump employed to draw, by the same stroke, the water from the
stagnant channel, and that from the taps. It was perfectly easy to
distinguish the two systems of pipes, and how they united together at
the small pouch on their arrival. When this was distended, a vacuum
was created inside, which was instantly filled by the liquid from the
tube which ran into it, (do not ask me why or how; I will explain that
presently). When it contracted again, the liquid which had just entered
was not able to get back, being prevented from so doing by a very
ingenious and simple contrivance, which requires a brief explanation.

Take off the lock from your chamber-door, which opens inside; then,
standing outside, push against it with your shoulder, and you will get
in without any difficulty. But when you are in, try to push the door
open again with your shoulder in order to get outside into the passage,
and you will find that you will not be able to pass through, and this
simply because it does not open on that side.

Which was exactly what happened to the liquid in the pouch!

The door between the tube and the pouch only opened inwardly, and the
liquid finding itself pressed on all sides in proportion as the pouch
contracted more and more, and unable to return, was obliged at last
to make its way through another similar door which led to the large
compartment below. Here the same game recommenced. The compartment
which had distended itself to receive it, contracted in its turn, and
the liquid finding the road again barred behind it, had no choice but
to force its way through the tube which led to the air-reservoir.

Here commenced the work of the second pump,--the pump of the left
compartment. The little pouch, when distended, was filled by the liquid
from the reservoir, and then forced it forward into the large
compartment below, always by means of the same process. This compartment
again drove it, by a powerful contraction, into the large conducting
tube charged with the office of its general distribution throughout
the body. At the end of all which, it returned once more into the
right-hand pump as before, to pursue the same course again, &c., &c.

Thus, as you see, the whole mechanism turned upon two little points
of detail, of the simplest description possible; namely, first, on the
entrance-doors only opening on one side; and secondly, on the elastic
covers of the pouches and compartments distending and contracting
spontaneously. It was the prettiest thing in the world to see this
unpretending-looking little bag working thus, quite naturally, without
a suspicion that it was solving a problem which so many men, proud of
their science, had given up as hopeless. Certainly here was a machine
which made no noise! Once installed in its dark closet, it would have
been necessary to place your hand upon it to find out that it moved
at all. My lord could certainly sleep beside it without disturbance.

"How much do you want for it?" said they to the poor little beggar
girl. "Name your price; have no fear; we will pay you anything you
wish."

"I cannot give it to you," replied the child; "I need it too much
myself: IT IS MY HEART. Now that you have seen it, make another like
it, if you can." And she disappeared.

It is said that the engineer, who longed to see his idea carried out,
tried hard to construct a similar machine with gutta-percha and iron
wires, and to set it in motion by electricity. But history does not
tell us that he succeeded, and we have yet to ask ourselves whether
the richest man in the world, aided by the wisest men in the world,
could ever provide himself with a miracle of wonder, such as the,
ragged child had received as a free gift from the hands of a gracious
Creator.



LETTER XIV.

THE ARTERIES.

If you have thoroughly understood the story I last told you, my child,
it will have revealed to you the whole mystery of the _circulation
of the blood,_ and you are at the present moment wiser than all the
learned men of antiquity and the middle ages, for they had none of
them the faintest surmise of the truth.

It may, perhaps, seem odd to you that men should have existed for
upwards of five thousand years without making inquiry into a matter
which so closely concerned them, and which was so easy to find out.
Is it not almost incredible that so many hearts should have beaten for
so long a period without any of their owners having felt a wish to
know exactly _why?_ Yet so it is. The action of the heart and the
flow of the blood have not been understood for much more than two
hundred years, and the man whose name is attached to this great
discovery richly deserves that we should say a few words about him.

He was called Harvey. He was an Englishman; physician to King Charles
I., who was beheaded in 1648; and when he first ventured publicly to
teach that the blood was constantly circulating from one end of the
human body to the other, perpetually returning and retracing its steps,
a great scandal was created in the world. He was called a fool,--an
impertinent innovator,--a madman. His words shattered old doctrines,
and he only received for his reward all the petty annoyances which men
are apt to lavish so freely upon any one who tells them something new;
because--do you see?--it is so disagreeable to be disturbed in one's
habits and preconceived ideas.

Harvey is not the only one in the history of mankind who has committed
the sin of being right in defiance of the opinions of his age. It is
true posterity takes account afterwards of the labors of genius, and
inscribes a fresh name upon her list. But one must pay for this glory
in one's lifetime. One cannot have everything at once.

This is an old story, my child, but always new nevertheless; and for
my own part it is, I own, one of my pleasures to amuse myself by
reflecting how much cause for laughter three-fourths of the great men
of the present day are providing for the little girls who shall be
alive two centuries hence. Time is a great avenger, and puts many
things and men in their proper places.

Let us pause here a moment while we are speaking of Harvey. I should
be curious to know what any one of the courtiers of Charles I., bedecked
in feathers, ribbons and laces, would have said to the valet who would
have placed the excellent Harvey, with his insane invention, above his
most gracious majesty, the lord and king of all Great Britain! And yet
what is his most gracious majesty to you to-day? What do you owe to
him? in what does he interest you? While you can never hear the name
of Harvey pronounced without remembering that you are under many
obligations to him! A thousand years hence, when society shall have
made the great progress which may reasonably be expected, the name of
Harvey will be familiar to every one who owns a heart, while that of
Charles I. will be only a vanished shadow; a souvenir lost in the maze
of history.

Our debt of remembrance paid, let us return to the heart--the little
closed bag which labors so prettily. We must now inquire the real names
of whatever has figured in our story.

The two great compartments are called _ventricles,_ the two small
pouches _auricles,_ and they are also distinguished as being on the
right or left side;--_right ventricle, left ventricle, right auricle,
left auricle._

The inner doors on which depends all the action of the machine, are
called _valvelets._ By-and-bye, when the pump and the steam-engine
are explained to you, you will meet again with these treacherous doors,
which never allow what has once entered to go back again; but then we
shall call them _valves._

The air-reservoir, I need scarcely tell you, is the _lung,_ to
which the blood goes to put itself in contact with the air.

The subterranean watercourse, of which I hope we have talked long
enough, is _the small intestine,_ in which the _chyle_ collects; and
the tubes which run into it are, of course, the _chyliferous vessels,_
the only channels by which anything reaches the heart which has not
previously gone out from it.

The tubes of distribution, which run out from the machine in all
directions, are called with us _arteries_; the return tubes, which
bring back the water to the machine, are called _veins._

Finally, we have not exactly the _filters_ employed to clear the
water from the impurities contracted as it goes along, for no such
thing exists in us. There are in our case the refuse-chambers of which
I have already spoken, in connexion with the liver, where the blood
disembarrasses itself of any useless materials, and from which it comes
out with clean pockets, so to speak, reverting to the comparison of
which we have already availed ourselves.

As you see, then, everything comes round again; and the bright idea
which our professors hit upon in order to satisfy the caprice of the
banker is exactly carried out in your own body, only a thousand times
more perfectly than could have been done by them all, even with all
their science added to all his money.

I mentioned that the shrewdest of the party boasted about making an
artificial heart. But, let me tell you, there is one thing I would
have defied him to imitate, by any expedient he could devise, and that
is the inimitable construction of the _arteries_ and _veins,_ and the
incomprehensible delicacy of their innumerable ramifications.

Let us talk a little about these marvellous tubes, and begin with the
arteries, which have the most important part to play.

Did you ever see a doctor try the pulse of his patient? Take hold of
your own wrist and search a little above the thumb. You will soon find
the place and feel something beating against your finger. There is an
artery which passes there, and the little beating you feel is the
rebound of the pulsations, of your heart. Every time that the left
_ventricle,_ by contracting itself, chases the blood into the arteries,
these, of which the tissue is very elastic, become distended all at
once, and then contract again, repeating the process whenever a fresh
gush of blood arrives, so that their movement is exactly regulated by
the movement of the heart. It is true the two movements are in a
contrary direction; that is to say, the artery becomes distended, while
the heart contracts, and contracts when the heart enlarges itself; but
that makes no difference to the doctor. What he wants to know is, with
what force and rapidity the heart of the patient beats, and I will
explain why. It is an interesting point in the history of circulation.

When you were very little--very little indeed, my dear child--your
heart beat from 130 to 140 times in a minute. Afterwards the beats
sank to 100 per minute; then to fewer still. At present I cannot tell
you the precise number: perhaps, about ninety. When you are a grown-up
young lady, it will beat about eighty times in the minute; when you
are a mother, about seventy-three times; when a grandmother (if such
a blessing be granted you), only from fifty to sixty times, perhaps
even fewer. People tell of an old man of eighty-four whose heart beat
only twenty-nine times in the sixty seconds.

Observe that in all my calculations I have taken special care to prefix
the word _about_ to the numbers mentioned. And this because, in
point of fact, the heart is a capricious creature, which has no exact
rules to go by. It changes its pace on every occasion--fear, joy, every
emotion which agitates the soul, quickens or retards its movements;
and derangements of health may be detected by its pulsations, which
are infinitely varied in character. In fever, for instance, which is
nothing but a race of the blood at full speed, the hearts of grown-up
people beat as quickly as those of little children; sometimes, indeed,
more quickly still. In certain maladies it goes with great sudden
leaps, like a galloping horse; in others it trots in little jerks;
while in some cases it moves slowly and wearily, and its throbs are
so weak that one can scarcely feel them.

These pulsations, then, afford important revelations to the doctor.
The heart is for him a gossiping confidant, who lets out the secrets
of illnesses, however closely they may fancy themselves hidden in the
remote depths of the body. When the doctor lays his finger on the
patient's pulse, it is precisely the same thing to him as if he had
laid it on his heart, only with this difference, that the one is much
less difficult to do, and much sooner done than the other.

The artery of the wrist is in fact a small heart, not only because it
follows all the movements of the large one, but because it carries
forward the work which the other begins, and assists also in propelling
the blood to the furthest extremities of the limbs, driving it on in
its turn at each of its own contractions. Imagine a fire-engine, whose
pipes should take up and drive forwards along their whole length the
water which is thrown upon the fire, and you will have some idea of
the marvellous machine which is at work in our behalf within us. Nor
are you to suppose that the wrist-artery is a specially privileged
one, because it has been chosen to hold intercourse with physicians.
All the others are equally serviceable; and if they cannot all be
used for "feeling the pulse," it is because they are generally more
deeply buried in the flesh, where it is not easy to reach them.

Observe your mother when she is packing a trunk, and you will see that
whatever she is most afraid maybe spoiled, she is most careful to put
in the middle, so that it may be least exposed to accidents. And this
is what a kind Providence has done with the arteries, which have the
utmost cause to dread accidents; whilst the veins, which are much
better able to bear rough usage, are allowed to wander about freely
just under the skin. But when the bones happen to take up a great deal
of room, and come near the skin themselves, as is the case in the
wrist, the artery is forced, whether he likes it or not, to venture
to the surface, and then we are able to put our fingers upon him.

And there are others in the same sort of situation; the artery of the
foot for instance. But only just think how far from agreeable it would
be to have to take off your shoe and present your foot to the doctor!

The artery which passes to the temple, just by the ear, is another
affair. That would answer the purpose very well in fact, and I even
advise you to make use of it when you want to feel your own pulse. It
is more easily found than the other even, and its pulsations are still
more easily perceptible. Nevertheless, when all is said and done, it
is better for the doctor to take his patient by the hand than by the
head. Merely as a matter of good manners.

I will now make you acquainted with the principal arteries, and the
manner in which they distribute the blood through the body.

The whole of the blood driven out by the left ventricle at each of its
contractions, passes into one large canal called the _aorta_. The
_aorta_ as it goes away at first ascends; then bends back in a curve;
and from this curve, which is called the _arch of the aorta_ (from its
shape) diverge right and left, certain branch-pipes which carry the
blood into the two arms and on each side of the head; and which are, in
fact, the beginning, or upper end, of those whose pulsations we feel
with our fingers in the two wrists and at the temples.

The supply to the upper part of the body being secured, the _aorta_
begins to descend. But now imagine of what importance it must be, that
this head-artery--the foster-father of the whole body--should be
sheltered from every accident. The _aorta_ once divided, death is
inevitable; you might as well have your head cut off at once; and
thus it has been fixed in the best--that is to say, the safest--place.
Of course you know what is meant by the _backbone_ or _spine_, called
also the _vertebral column_, in consequence of its being made like a
sort of column composed of a series of small bones fastened together,
which are named _vertebræ_. Touch it and feel how solid it is, and how
few dangers there can be for anything placed behind it. Well, that is
the rampart which has been given to the _Aorta_. As this descends, it
slips behind the heart and takes up its place in front of the _vertebral
column_ which it follows all the way down the back, just to the top of
the loins. There it is, so to speak, almost unassailable; in fact hardly
any cases are known of the _Aorta_ being wounded; to get at it, it would
be necessary to bestow one of those blows which used to be given in the
time of the Crusades, which cut the body in two. There was an end of the
_Aorta_, as of every thing else then; it was unfortunately not worth
talking about any longer!

The next time you see a fish on the table, ask to be shown the large
central bone. It is the fish's _vertebral column_, and it will give you
an idea of your own, for it is constructed on the same plan. You will
perceive a blackish thread running all along it--that is _the aorta_.

As it descends, the _aorta_ sends off on its passage a great number of
arteries which carry the blood into all parts of the body. Arrived at
the loins it forms a fork; dividing into two great branches, which
continue their descent, one on each side the body, down to the very
extremities of the two feet.

As you perceive, dear child, this is not very difficult to remember.
A large fork, whose two points are at the tips of the feet, the handle
of which curves at the top like the crook of a crozier; from this curve
come four branches, which pass into the two arms and to the two sides
of the head--and this is the whole story. But of course, it would be
another affair were I to enter into the detail of all the ramifications.
Here it is that all engineers, past, present, and future, are baffled,
defeated and outdone! Choose any place you please upon your body, and
run the finest needle you can find into it what will issue from the
puncture?

"Thanks for the proposal," you say; "I have no occasion to try the
experiment, to discover that blood will come out."

You say that very readily, young lady; but have you ever asked yourself,
what is implied by your being so sure before hand that you can bring
blood from any part of your body if you choose to prick it, though
never so slightly? It implies that there is not on your whole frame
a spot the size of a needle's point, which has not its own little canal
filled with blood; for if there were such a one, there at any rate the
needle would pass in without tearing the canal, and causing the blood
to flow out. And now count the number of places from the top to the
bottom of your dear little self, on which one could put the point of
a needle, and even when you have counted them all, do not fancy you
have arrived at the number of the tiny tubes of blood. Compared to
these, your needle is a coarse stake, and tears not one but a thousand
of these little tubes in its passage.

That seems to you rather a strong expression, does it not? But let me
make good my boldness. A needle's point is very fine, I admit; but a
person who could not see it without spectacles must have very poor
sight. Whereas the last subdivisions of the blood-tubes are so
attenuated, that the best eyes in the world, your own included, cannot
distinguish them. You are astonished at this, and yet it is nothing
compared to what follows.

No doubt you have heard of the microscope,--that wonderful instrument
by which you may see objects a thousand, a hundred thousand, a million
times, if necessary, larger than they really are. With the microscope,
therefore, as a matter of course, we can see a good many of those tiny
canals which elude our unaided sight. But, alas! we discover at the
same time that these are by no means the last subdivisions. The canals
invisible to our naked eyes subdivide themselves again into others,
and these into others again, and so it goes on, till at last--the man
at the microscope can see no more, but the subdivisions still continue.

You were ready to exclaim, at my talking of thousands of canals being
torn by a needle in passing through; but had I even said millions, it
may be doubted whether I should have spoken the whole truth.

Besides, when you consider the office of the blood, you can easily
understand that if there were a single atom of the body left unvisited
by him, that atom could never be nourished. Do I say nourished? I have
made here a supposition altogether inadmissible; it could have no
existence at all, since it is the blood only which produces it.

These imperceptible canals of blood have been called _capillaries_,
from the Latin word, _capillus_, which means a hair; because the
old learned men, who had no suspicion of the wonders hereafter to be
revealed by the microscope, could think of no better way of expressing
their delicacy, than by comparing them to hairs. Very likely they
thought even this a great compliment, but your delicate fair hairs,
fine as they are, are absolute cables--and coarse cables too, believe
me, compared to the _capillary vessels_ which extend to every portion
of your body.

Observe further, that each of these arterial _capillaries_ is
necessarily composed (being the continuation of the large ones) of
three coats enclosed one within the other, which can be perfectly
distinguished in arteries of a tolerable size; add to this that within
these coats there is blood, and in the blood some thirty substances
we know of, not to speak of those we do not know; and then you will
begin to form some notion of the marvels collected together in each
poor little morsel of your body, however minute a one you may picture
to yourself.



LETTER XV.

THE NOURISHMENT OF THE ORGANS.

When I said formerly that our dear and wonderful steward the blood,
was everywhere at once, you little suspected the prodigies involved
in that _everywhere_. But you will have a glimpse of them now, when I
tell you it is at the extremities of the _capillary arteries_ that he
carries on his distribution of goods, and accomplishes a mysterious act
of nutrition; a wonder much greater even than that of which we have just
spoken. Here, indeed, the question is no longer mechanical divisions,
whose delicacy, surprising as it may be, is yet within our powers of
comprehension. What is more surprising still, what moreover we cannot
comprehend at all, is the delicate sensitiveness of tact--I would almost
say of instinct--with which each one of the million millions of tiny
atoms of which our body is composed, draws out of the blood--the common
food of all--exactly that aliment which is necessary to it, leaving the
rest to his neighbor, and this without ever making a mistake.

You have never thought about this; for children go on living at their
ease, as if it was the simplest thing in the world to do; never
suspecting even that their life is a continued miracle, and never, of
course, therefore, feeling bound to be grateful to the Author of that
miracle. And alas! how many hundreds of people live and die children
in that respect.

But what would happen, I should like to know, if the eye took to seizing
upon the food of the nail, if the hairs stopped on the way what was
intended for the muscles, if the tongue absorbed what ought to go to
the teeth, and the teeth what ought to go to the tongue! Yet what
prevents their doing so? Can you tell me? They all drink alike out of
the same cup. The same blood goes to furnish them all. The substances
that it brings to the eye are the same as those which it brings to the
nail; and nevertheless the eye takes from it that which makes an eye,
and the nail that which makes a nail.

How is this done, do you think? that is the question.

When the doctors reply to this, that each organ has its peculiar
sensibility, which makes it recognize and imbibe from the blood one
particular substance and no other, they are strangely mistaken if they
flatter themselves that they have really answered anything. They have
done nothing but reproduce the question in other words, for it is
precisely that sensibility which requires explanation, and to tell us
that it exists, does not explain much, you must own. If you were to
ask why you had got a headache, and some one were to reply that it was
because your head ached, you would not be much the wiser I fancy.

Each of our organs, then, may be considered as a distinct being, having
its separate life, and its particular likings. These organs behave
towards the blood like men who recognize some friend in a crowd, and
proceed to seize him by the arm; and when I told you just now that
they never made a mistake, I spoke of their regular course of action
in ordinary circumstances. Like men, they also make mistakes sometimes,
in certain cases; and take one substance for another, or do not
recognize the one they are in need of; an unanswerable proof that at
other times they exercise a sort of discernment, and do not act by a
sort of fatality, as one might be tempted to believe. Look at the
bones, for instance. They are composed of _gelatine_ (which cooks
serve up under the name of meat-jelly, but which would be more properly
called bone-jelly), and of phosphate of lime, a kind of stone of which
we have spoken before, if I remember rightly, and from which they get
all their solidity. Originally, the substance of the bone is entirely
gelatinous, and the phosphate of lime deposits itself therein by
degrees, as time goes on, and always in greater abundance as we advance
in age.

Properly the bones borrow only gelatine and phosphate of lime from the
blood. But when they come to be broken, their texture or _tissue_
inflames in the fractured place; and then it changes its tastes, if
I may so express myself; and, lo and behold, extracts from the blood
that which forms certain little fleshy shoots, which unite together
from the two sides of the fracture, and so mend the broken bone. Here is
one exception to the rule.

Again, in certain diseases, the bones suddenly quarrel with the
phosphate of lime; they will not hear of it any longer, they will not
accept a fresh supply; and as the old wears out by degrees, by reason
of the continual destruction of which I spoke the other day, the bones
become more and more enfeebled, and soon can no longer support the
body. A second exception this.

Finally, when old age comes on, the bones end by being so much
encumbered with phosphate of lime, that they have no room to admit the
fresh supply which keeps coming to them in the blood. What becomes of
it then? It goes to seek its fortune elsewhere; and there are charitable
souls, who forgetting their instinctive antipathies, consent to give
it hospitality, though much to the prejudice of the poor old man
himself, who is no longer served so well as formerly, by the incautious
servants who have allowed themselves to be thus fatally beguiled; but
no one consults him. It is the arteries especially, and sometimes
the muscles, which take this great liberty, and it is not unusual among
old people to meet with these fairly _ossified_--that is to say,
changed into bone, thanks to the phosphate of lime with which they
have consented to burden themselves. This is a third exception, and
I will spare you any others.

What may we infer from all this, my dear child? Well, two things.
First, that we know nothing at all about the whole affair; a fact which
at once places us on a footing with the most learned philosophers in
the world. Secondly, that our body is a perpetual miracle; a miracle
which eats and drinks and walks, and which we must not look down upon
for so doing: for God dwells therein. I should have to come back to
this at every turn, if I wanted to fathom everything I have to tell
you about. Each tip of hair which you grow, is an incomprehensible
prodigy which would puzzle us for ever, if we did not call to our aid
those eternal laws which have made us what we are, and to which it is
very just our spirits should submit, since we could not exist for one
second were they to cease from making themselves obeyed in our bodies.

Reflect on this, my dear little pupil. Young as you may be, you can
already understand from it, that there is above you something which
demands your respect. The good God, to whom your mother makes you pray
every night, on your knees, with folded hands, is not so far off as
you might perhaps suppose. He is not a being of the fancy, secluded
in the depths of that unknown space which men call Heaven, in order
to give it a name. If His all-powerful hand reaches thus into the
innermost recesses of your body, His voice speaks also in your heart,
and to what it says you must listen.



LETTER XVI.

THE ORGANS.

Contrary to my custom, my dear child, I made use, in the last chapter,
of a new word, without giving an explanation of it.

I spoke to you of _our organs_, and we have not yet ascertained what an
_organ_ is.

You probably knew what I meant, because it is a word which is used in
conversation and pretty well understood by everybody. But I am bent
upon giving you a more exact idea of it, for the trouble will be well
bestowed. If I did not do this at once it was because there is a good
deal to tell about, and that would have carried me too far away from
my subject.

_Organ_, comes from the Greek word _organon_, and means _instrument_. It
was used particularly to signify instruments of music, so much so that
our word "organ" comes from it

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