Theodor Mommsen - "Römische Geschichte Book 4"

Mary Eales - "Mrs. Mary Eales's receipts. (1733)"

Anonymous - "Little Cinderella"

August von Kotzebue - "The Stranger"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

The History of a Mouthful of Bread

J >> Jean Mace >> The History of a Mouthful of Bread




So, while I am on the subject, I should like to advise those who wishto
apply themselves to what is called _politics_--that is to say, social
life--to begin their studies of the body social, by studying the body
human, first. They will learn more from it than from the newspapers!

But you have nothing to do with all this. For the present, take notice
of one thing only; viz., that the hand of the same God has passed over
everything, and that there is neither much presumption nor much merit
in tracing points of comparison between the different parts of His
work. These comparisons are not a mere play of the mind; they really
exist ready made in the very foundations of things.

Now let us come down a little from these heights and return to our
friends the lungs. I have not spoken about them for some time, and I
have not yet told you how they are constructed.

I wish I could show you some, but the cook will do so, if you would
like to see them. The _lights_ with which she feeds the cat and
the dog are the lungs of some animal.

Take up a piece in your hand, and you will find you have got hold of
something _light_ (cooks have not given it its name without a reason),
which is also soft, sinks under your finger if you press it, and rises
again afterwards like a sponge. In fact, the lung, like the sponge, is
composed of an infinity of minute cells, whose elastic sides can be
contracted or expanded at will. They are like so many little chambers,
into every one of which blood and air keep running hastily, each on its
own side, to bid good day to each other, touch hands, and then hurry out
as briskly as they came in. Whether the bit of lights the cat is eating,
comes from an ox, a pig, or a sheep, you may look at it with perfect
confidence; your own lung is precisely like it. You would see nothing
different, could you look into your own chest.

So much for the _substance_ of the lungs. As to SHAPE, imagine
two large, elongated packets, flat inside, descending right and left,
inside the breast, and bearing the heart, suspended between the two,
in the middle. The extremity of each packet descends below the heart,
and it is in the interval which separates them that the arch of the
diaphragm performs its up and down movement.

I have already said that air reaches the lungs through the _larynx_. The
_larynx_ (of which we shall speak further when I have explained another
curious thing very valuable to little girls--the voice), the _larynx_ is
a tube composed of five pieces of _cartilage_ (you know now what
_cartilage_ or _gristle_ is), the firm resisting texture of which keeps
it always open. After these five pieces of _cartilage_, come others, and
the tube is continued; but it then takes the name of the _trachea_; the
_larynx_ and _trachea_ constituting the _windpipe_. At its entrance into
the chest, the _trachea_ divides into two branches, which are called
_bronchial tubes_, and which run, one into the right lung, the other
into the left. You sometimes hear people talking about _bronchitis_. It
is an inflammation of these _bronchial tubes_, which are within an inch
or two of the lungs. It is necessary, therefore, to be very careful in
such circumstances, and do exactly what the doctor prescribes, because--
one step further, and the inflammation extends from the bronchial tubes
into the lungs themselves, with which it is not safe to play tricks.

Having reached the lungs, the _bronchial tubes_ subdivide into
branches, which ramify again in their turn like the boughs of a tree,
and the whole ramification terminates in imperceptible little tubes,
each of which comes out in one of those little chambers I was talking
about just now. And this is the way in which air gets there at all.

The venous blood which leaves the heart, arrives on its side by one
large canal, which passes out from the right ventricle, and which is
called the _pulmonary artery_. And, to tell you the truth, while there
is no learned man present to be angry with us, it is a very ill-chosen
name, because it is _venous_ blood which flows in this so-called
_artery_. But the doctors have decided that all the vessels which run
from the heart should be called _arteries_, and all those which go back
to it _veins_, whatever may be the nature of the blood which they
contain. We cannot help it, because they manage all these matters in
their own way; but in that case it was scarcely worth their while to
talk about _arterial_ and _venous_ blood. It would have been better to
have said simply, red blood and black blood.

Be this as it may, _venous blood_ arrives from the right _ventricle_
through the _pulmonary artery_. This divides itself, like the _bronchial
tubes_, into thousands of little pipes, whose extremities come creeping
along the partitions of the little chambers in question.

And here, then, takes place, between the air and the blood, that
mysterious intercourse for the account of which I have kept you waiting
so long; and at the end of which the black blood becomes red, or, in
other words, from venous becomes arterial. I have called it
"intercourse," and this is really the proper phrase; for this
transformation of the blood is accomplished by means of an exchange.
The air gives something to the blood, and the blood gives something
to the air--each giving, in exchange, like two people over a bargain
in the marketplace.

With your permission, my dear child, we will stop here to-day. We have
now got to the charcoal market, and it is a little black.



LETTER XX.

CARBON AND OXYGEN.

Here, then, my dear child, we have arrived at the explanation of that
great mystery, WHY _we breathe._ Keep on the alert, for we are now
entering into a region where everything will be new to you.

Here we are at the charcoal market, I said to you just now, and no
doubt you concluded that I was beginning another comparison.

But no such thing; there is no question of comparison or simile here;
I state the fact itself, pure and simple as it stands: it is a
_market,_ for commercial intercourse and exchange are carried on
there, as I told you before, and it is a _charcoal_ market,
because _charcoal_ is, positively, the essential and chief article of
commerce.

You are astonished, I dare say, and are ready to ask me whether I can
possibly mean real charcoal, charcoal such as the cook puts into the
furnace. Surely, say you, we have nothing like _that_ in our bodies?
Surely we don't eat _that_?

But I answer yes; real, true charcoal, and you do not dislike it; you
eat of it even daily; nay, you do not swallow a single mouthful of
food which does not contain its proportion of charcoal.

You laugh; but wait a little and listen.

When you are toasting a slice of bread for breakfast, and hold it too
near the fire, what happens to it?

It turns quite black, does it not?

When mutton-chops are left too long unturned on the gridiron, what
happens to them?

They turn quite black also.

When your brother forgets the apples which he has set to roast, what
happens to them?

They turn quite black, as you have seen more than once.

It is always black, then, that these things turn, is it not? and a
fine rich _charcoaly_ black, as you may see if you please to
observe charcoal closely, for just such is the color of little burnt
cakes, over-roasted chestnuts, and potatoes in their skins, which have
been dropped into the fire.

But there is a common term by which we can express more accurately the
misfortune which has befallen all these various things--slices of
bread, mutton-chops, apples, cakes, chestnuts, potatoes, and what-not,
when "burnt," "over-toasted," "over-roasted," or "over-baked." We may
call them _carbonized_, or more simply _charred_ or _charcoaled_; though
the word _charred_ is generally used only for burnt _wood_. But _carbon_
being the principal ingredient of _charcoal_, and _charcoal_ being one
of the purer forms in which we get at _carbon_, they are almost
synonymous terms, and you may call your burnt food _carbonized_, or
_charred_, or _charcoaled_, whichever you prefer.

The next question is, how did charcoal or carbon get into the food so
as to justify our talking of its being _carbonized_ or _charred_? Even
when we use charcoal stoves for cooking, the charcoal does not jump out
and get into the mutton-chops, etc., you may be sure. Then it is clear
it must have been in them before they were brought to the fire to be
cooked; and such is indeed the case, only its black face escaped notice
because it was in such gay-looking company, and kept itself hid behind
the others like a needle lost in a match-box. Set fire to the matches,
and you will soon have nothing left but the needle, which will then
strike your eye at once. And so with our burnt food; the fire has
carried off all the other ingredients, and the charcoal is left behind
alone, exposed to everybody's view, as if on purpose to teach them that
it was always there; in the apples, i.e., the potatoes, mutton-chops,
etc., which seemed so tempting when the black rogue was hid, but from
which now, when he is there by himself, they turn away in disgust.

Charcoal is, in fact, a much more generally distributed substance than
you have been used to suppose, dear child. That which comes from burnt
wood is most easily observed, because there is a much larger proportion
of charcoal in wood than anywhere else; but there is not a morsel,
however small, of any animal or vegetable whatsoever, which does not
contain charcoal. In the sugar which you crunch, in the wine which you
drink, there is charcoal. I could even find some in the water you wash
in if I were to try hard. There is charcoal in the goose-quill which
I hold in my hand at this moment, and in the paper on which I am
writing, and in the handkerchief on my knee. If I hold them all three
in the light of my wax taper, I shall soon see them turn black and
betray the presence of our friend. It exists in the wax taper itself,
as also in the candle, as also in the oil lamp. If I were to hold a
piece of flat glass above their flame, I should collect enough of it
to blacken the tip of anybody's nose who presumed to doubt the fact.
There is a portion of it in the air; a portion of it in the earth.
Where is it not? In short, all the stones of all the buildings in the
world are filled with it from top to bottom. _Charcoal,_ under his more
scientific and important name of _carbon,_ may be called one of the
great lords of the world. His domain is so extensive that one might go
round the world without getting out of it; he is even worse than the
Marquis of Carabas.

After this you will never, I hope, want to persuade me you do not
eatcharcoal; for, indeed, you would be puzzled to escape doing so. Of
all the things you see on the dinner-table there is but one in which you
will not find it--viz., the salt-cellar; and even while saying this,
I mean only, in the _salt_ itself, for as to the salt-cellar,
clear and transparent as its glass may be, there is charcoal in it!

Our bodies, therefore, are full of charcoal. Everything that we eat
supplies them with enormous quantities of it, which take up their
quarters in every corner of our organs. It is one of the principal
materials of the vast collection of structures of which I spoke to you
in the early part of these letters, and of which the blood, the steward
of the body, is the universal master-builder. If you remember, I told
you then that these structures fell to pieces of themselves, in
proportion as the workmen went on building, and that the blood, which
brings fresh materials on its arrival from the lungs and heart, carries
away the refuse ones on its return. And, of all these refuse materials,
old charcoal is one of those which takes up the most room, as fresh
charcoal took up a great deal of room in the new materials. The blood,
as he goes back again, has his pockets quite crammed with it, and if
he did not try hard to get rid of it as fast as possible, he would be
disabled from being of any further use.

Now it is in the lungs that he clears himself of it. He gives it up
to the air, which has need of it for a very interesting operation, of
which I shall tell you more by and bye; and in return the air gives
him something which is quite indispensable to him, for without it he
would not dare to return to the organs, as his authority would no
longer be recognised.

In the same way, the charcoal-seller goes to market with his charcoal
and receives silver in exchange.

If he were to go home without money his wife would receive him with
abuse.

But what is the indispensable thing which the blood obtains in his
marketing?

Remember its name well: it is OXYGEN.

And we must speak of it with respect, for we are talking here of a
very great and powerful personage, very superior even to CARBON. If
CARBON be one of the great lords of the world, OXYGEN is its king.

There is a certain substance, my dear child, of which many people,
especially little girls, do not even know the name, but which yet
constitutes of itself alone a good half of everything we are acquainted
with in the world. And this substance is the very thing I have just
named to you. It is OXYGEN.

Ascend into the air as high as you can go, viz., to forty miles or so
from the ground, as we said before; _oxygen_ forms the fifth part
of that vast aerial ocean which surrounds the globe on every side.
There it is free--is _itself_--if I may use the expression; it
is in the condition of _gas_; that is to say, it eludes our sight,
though there is no difficulty in ascertaining its presence, when one
knows how to set about it.

Go down into the depths of the sea. People think they have good reasons
for believing this to be two and a half miles deep on an average, which
would give a pretty little sum total of tons for its whole weight, as
you will be convinced, if you take the trouble of observing the space
it covers on a map of the world;--to say nothing of lakes, rivers,
streams, the water in the clouds, the water scattered throughout the
interior or on the surface of continents, including that with which
you wash your face every morning.

Oxygen enters in the proportion of eight-ninths into the composition
of this incalculable mass. _Eight-ninths_, you understand, which
is very near being the whole nine; in every nine pounds of water there
are eight pounds of oxygen, the remainder being left for another
substance, of which we shall have occasion to speak presently, and
which is called _hydrogen_.

The earth on which you tread is full of oxygen. So far as we have
penetrated hitherto into the interior of the globe, we have found king
Oxygen everywhere: hidden under a thousand forms, connected with a
heap of substances, not one of which could exist without him; imprisoned
in a thousand combinations, and always ready to resume his natural
condition if his prison-house be destroyed. The whole surface of the
earth, plains, hills, mountains, towns, deserts, cultivated fields,
everything you would look down upon, if on a clear day you could be
carried high enough in a balloon to take in the whole earth at a
glance:--all that may be considered as an immense reservoir of oxygen,
out of which we should see it escaping in gigantic waves, if some
superhuman chemist were to take it into his head to put our poor little
globe into a retort of the same kind as chemists use among us. To give
you an example; the stones of our fine buildings, in which we have
already discovered the presence of _carbon_, are almost half made
up of _oxygen_. In a stone which weighs 100 lbs. there are 48
lbs. of oxygen, and the first chemist who passes by could make them
come out of it if he chose, if he were to use a little trouble and
skill.

I enumerated to you last time many of the substances in which _carbon_
is to be found; but as regards _oxygen_ we must give up all attempt at
making a list; it would comprehend the whole dictionary. Touch whatever
lies under your hand--in your room--in the house--wherever you may go--I
will almost defy you to put your finger upon anything--metals
excepted--which is not crammed with oxygen. Your very body, to conclude
with, would become so small a thing, were the oxygen it contains
extracted from it, that you would be perfectly amazed.

So when I told you oxygen was king of the world, I did not say too
much, did I? Between ourselves too, it is a great misfortune that
people live on so complacently in total ignorance of this all-important
material, which is connected with everything, which insinuates itself
everywhere, which we make use of every instant of our lives, which may
almost be said to be in some sort our very selves, since it constitutes
three-fourths of our body, but whose name nevertheless would, I am
certain, make many pretty little mouths pout, if one were to utter it
in a drawing-room.

This is really the case. Many young ladies who are proud to know who
Caractacus was, would be ashamed to know anything about oxygen. There
is a foolish notion that women have no business with such subjects,
probably because children are supposed not to breathe and mothers are
not required to watch over them?

This reminds me that we are on the road to explain _respiration,_
which I had almost forgotten in lifting up this corner of the veil
behind which Nature hides her most valuable secrets from the idle and
ignorant.

It is _oxygen_ then, which the blood carries off triumphantly from his
interview with the air in the cells of the lungs; and, by the way, it
is, thanks to this oxygen that it returns from the lungs to the heart,
and so from the heart to the organs, with that beautiful rosy tint which
distinguishes _arterial_ from _venous_ blood.

Now the blood gives out this oxygen on its road every time it performs
the journey, and the perpetual course it performs from the lungs to
the organs, and from the organs to the lungs, has for its chief object
the perpetual renovation of this previous provision, which is as
perpetually consumed.

Do you ask of what use it is? Does the blood leave it at random in our
organs, and is it one of the materials with which our steward is
constantly providing the little workmen of the body for their various
constructions?

No, my dear child. The proverb _"One cannot live upon air,"_ is
a very true one, although it is equally true that we cannot live without
air. Air does not nourish our organs; on the contrary, it consumes
them, and what we eat, serves to supply in precisely the same proportion
its insatiable appetite. When we leave off eating, from whatever cause,
the air does not leave off too. He goes on always just the same, and
that is the reason why people who are starved to death are so thin.
(The air has consumed the vital parts.)

You did not expect this; but now prepare yourself to go on from one
surprise to another. To begin with, I shall have to stop here and
explain to you before we go any further--can you guess what? Nay, I
am sure you cannot; FIRE.

There is not much connection, you will say, between _fire_ and
_breathing_.

But there you are mistaken. It is precisely the same thing, as I will
prove to you next time.



LETTER XXI.

COMBUSTION.

Have you never, my dear child, whilst warming your little feet on the
hearth in winter-time, asked yourself, _What is fire?_ that great
benefactor of man; fire, without which part of the world would be
uninhabitable by us during at least a third of the year; fire, without
which we could not bake a morsel of bread, and would have to eat our
meat raw; fire, which lights up the night for us, and without which
we should have to go to bed when the hens go to roost; fire, which
subdues metals, and without which we should have neither iron, nor
copper, nor silver, nor anything that is manufactured from those
materials; fire, without which, in short, human industry could not
rise to much higher results than that of the monkey and of the beaver?

We are all of us, it is true, so much accustomed to fire that we do
not pay much attention to it, and have a sort of persuasion that lucifer
matches have existed from all eternity. But the first men, who were
nearer neighbors to that great discovery whence all others have
originated--the first men treated fire with more respect than we do.
It was to them one of the mighty things of the world. The ancient
Persians made a god of it, and told how Zoroaster, their prophet, went
to seek it in heaven, passing thither from the top of the Himalayas,
the highest chain of mountains in the known world.

The old Greeks pretended that Prometheus stole it from the gods, to
make a present of it to man, which came to nearly the same thing as
the Persian account. The Romans had their _sacred fire_, which
the celebrated Vestals were bound to keep lighted, on pain of death
to whoever should let it go out. At the present day we do not stand
upon such ceremonies, but warm our feet at it quite familiarly, without
wishing for anything further. But you would see a terrible revolution
in the world if some Prometheus reversed were, some fine morning, to
steal it from us, and carry it back to its ancient owners. Every branch
of human industry would suddenly stop, as if by enchantment, and in
the course of a very few years the poor little framework of human
society, of which we are now so proud, would totally change its aspect,
and the whole world would be turned topsy-turvy.

But do not be alarmed; there is no danger of the sort. Fire is not a
present once made to man, but liable to be taken away from him at will.
It is a law of nature which existed before the human race came into
being, and which will doubtless continue to exist when the human race
shall have disappeared. The existence of fire is connected in the most
intimate way with that of that great king of the world of whom we spoke
last time--Oxygen. Fire is the wedding-feast of Oxygen with other
substances!

When kings are married, what rejoicings there are! what a commotion!
what illuminations! It is only right and proper, then, that the king
of the world should have rejoicings and illuminations at his weddings
also. And they have never been wanting. The rejoicings are the warmth
which rejoices us; the illuminations, the flame which gives us light.
But man, in his dealings with nature, is an imperious subject, such
as few earthly kings are troubled with--happily for them! Whenever he
wants warmth and light he forces the king of the world to get married,
and then takes advantage of the feast; nothing worse than that.

"How so?" you exclaim. "If I want to make a fire with stones or iron,
I should never succeed. Is this because oxygen never unites himself
with those substances, nor with heaps of others which are equally
useless in lighting a fire? Yet you told me that oxygen was to be met
with almost everywhere."

It is a fair question, my dear child; but my answer is, that what you
said last is precisely the reason why all substances are not fit for
making fire of. When oxygen is already there, as he is in stones, for
instance, the marriage is over--the feast cannot begin again. Kings
are like other people in this respect; their weddings are only
celebrated once. If you had happened to be present at the moment when
oxygen was united to the materials of which stones are composed, you
would have seen a feast of which I should like to have heard some news.
I was not there myself either; but learned men in these latter days
have succeeded in breaking the bonds which united oxygen with the
primitive substances in certain fragments of stone, and with these
substances thus freed, and consequently able to remarry, they have
been enabled to give us, in miniature, the spectacle of the festivities
of a fresh wedding. And I can assure you it is enough to make one
shudder, to think of the time when such a marriage must have taken
place on a large scale.

With regard to _iron_ the case is quite different.

You have without doubt heard tell of Louis XIV. (of France), that proud
king who was called _le Grand_, and who is said to have heard
himself compared to the sun, without smiling. It seems that he one day
took it into his head to marry, it is difficult to say why, with Madame
de Maintenon, the old wife of a poor paralytic poet named Scarron,
who, as such, however, was only known by some few farces. Do you suppose
that the palace of Versailles was illuminated in honor of this marriage?
Not a bit of it. It was a disgraceful marriage, which they were bound
to keep secret. The ceremony was conducted mysteriously and without
lighting a single candle more than ordinary.

I do not pretend to say that oxygen has any of these weaknesses, nor
that he is any more partial to marrying with one body more than with
another. In the good God's great world, outside of the family of man,
they know nothing of our foolish pride, of our little weaknesses. It
is nevertheless a fact that this dear monarch has his preferences, and
that all his marriages are not made in this fashion.

Leave those pretty little scissors of yours, with which you would try
in vain to make a fire, outside your window for two or three days, and
then observe the dreadful, scaly, red stain which you are sure to find
on them afterwards, and which is called _rust._ Have you any idea
whence it proceeds? I will tell you. It comes from the oxygen, which
has been making one of those cheerless secret marriages with the iron
of your scissors. So there have been no pretty sights nor sounds, no
lights nor cheerful noises to entertain anybody, and though people may
have wished for them ever so much, they have had to do without them.

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