The History of a Mouthful of Bread

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Fat is, then, the savings' bank of the blood; there it deposits its
savings, and there it can always find them again in time of need.
Witness the fat pig described by Liebig, the great German chemist,
which having been swallowed up by a landslip, was found alive at the
end of 160 days. Fat was out of the question there, of course; the
animal weighed ten stone less than before. We will take the illustrious
professor's word on trust, but were a few days subtracted from the
account the case would still be a splendid example of the resource
which blood finds in fat when other nourishment fails; for the pig had
certainly been breathing during the whole 160 days, and as, in all
probability, he moved about much slower than usual, his hydrogen and
carbon fire was never extinguished for a single instant; of that I am
perfectly certain, and you shall soon know why. It was well for the
poor fellow himself that he had put by his provisions in time of plenty.
And who suffered? Why, the pig's master, who had looked forward with
pleasure to the rashers of bacon he should cut by and by from the
stores of combustibles in his larder. For once Master Piggy ate his
own bacon himself!

You understand now, I hope, by what ingenious management that marvellous
stove, called an animal, never burns too much fuel, whatever be the
quantity it is supplied with, and how, on the other hand, it has always
as much as it wants.

I have now to explain how important it is that it _should_ always
have enough, and that this is not merely a question of heat and cold,
as with dining-room stoves, but one of life and death! Cheer up! I
have only one more word to say about Respiration, and when you have
heard it you will appreciate still better the lesson of economy which
you have learnt from Nature to-day.

LETTER XXIII.

ACTION OF THE BLOOD UPON THE ORGANS.

The first time we talked about the Blood, my dear little pupil, I
introduced him to you as the steward of your body, and what a steward
to be sure! Always awake, as you may remember, always in motion; his
pockets ever full of the materials unceasingly required by the
indefatigable builders of that human edifice in which it has pleased
God to house your dear little self. If you wish really to understand
what follows now, we must carry on the simile a little further.

A steward not only provides the workmen with materials, but gives them
orders as well, and this is part of the blood's business also. He is
not only commissary-general, but _whipper-in_ of the whole household,
and besides the care of giving out all the stores, has the charge to see
that everything is properly done. The unhappy men who purchase
prosperity at the dreadful cost of maintaining slavery, pretend that
their slaves would do no work worth looking at, were there not always
some one behind them with a whip in his hand. Well, our organs are
slaves, and slaves of the worst sort. They would never do anything
at all, if the blood were not everlastingly whipping them up in his
ceaseless rounds. Let him come to a stand-still for one minute, for
a second even, and everything stops short; then we are at once in the
castle of the Sleeping Beauty in the wood. But perhaps I cannot do
better than to compare our bodily machine to a violin--to hit upon
something less dismal than slaves--a violin with blood for its bow.
As long as the bow runs over the strings the violin makes music and
lives; when the bow stops, it is silent and dies.

You have never yet had a fainting fit, my dear child; it rarely happens
at your age. But you may possibly have seen somebody faint; or, at any
rate, you have heard it talked about. Do you know what takes place in
such cases? Now and then, in consequence of some violent emotion, but
how or why I cannot tell you, all the blood rushes suddenly back towards
the heart, as during an earthquake a river will sometimes flow back
towards its source, leaving its bed dry. Thereupon the face turns
white, as if to give notice that there is no longer anything red below
the skin. The organs, no longer stimulated by the blood, leave off
work altogether. The brain goes to sleep, the muscles relax,
consciousness ceases, and you behold the poor body, from which the
soul seems to have departed, give way on all sides, and fall to the
ground like a corpse. This is not exactly death, but it is yet an
interruption of life. It would be death if nature did not get the upper
hand again, and send back the deserter to his post.

I may remark here that it was partly on this account that some of the
ancients thought the soul was seated in the blood; not a bad idea for
people who were determined to pronounce where the soul was, when it
is so easy to say one knows nothing about it. But those who placed it
in the breath, and who have bequeathed to us those beautiful
expressions--_yielding up the last breath--giving up the ghost_--were
not wrong neither.

In point of fact the blood is not the soul of the body; in other words,
does not keep the body alive, otherwise than by keeping up unceasingly
and everywhere that magic fire of which we were talking last time.

The French people, in their picturesque language, have found an
expression, full of energy, to express the action exercised by the
master workman, who knows how to make his people work: "_Il vous met
le feu sous le ventre._" [Footnote: Literally, _he puts fire under
their bellies;_ but here signifying that he makes it so hot that
the organs are compelled to continue in motion.] This is, to the letter,
the process employed by the blood to make the organs work. It makes
a fire under the belly. Unhappily their work only lasts as long as the
fire which causes the heat, and which is so necessary to life that it
is almost confounded with it. It is the sacred fire of the Roman
Vestals, which must be fed night and day under pain of death should
it go out. Now, if to feed the sacred fire of life, it be necessary
that the blood should everywhere find hydrogen and carbon
_unattached_, that is to say, free and ready to unite themselves
to oxygen, it is no less necessary that he should bring oxygen with
him everywhere. Else there would be no marriage, and therefore no fire.
Oxygen is, then, the talisman which brings the organs to obedience.
Without oxygen he would be a slave-driver without his whip; his orders
would be despised. If the organs were to be deluged with _venous_
blood--with that black blood which has lost its oxygen, they would not
stir any more than if they had received so much water. They acknowledge
nothing but _arterial_ blood--red blood--blood rich in oxygen.
That is what they respect, and which has authority over them; the other
is a bankrupt who has lost his credit with his cash; those whom he fed
but lately now laugh in his face. And as our good steward spends all
his oxygen every time he goes his rounds, it would soon be over with
him, and, consequently, with us, too, if he had not some method of
replenishing his purse after each journey. Happily the lungs are the
inexhaustible chest to which he always returns to renew his right of
authority; that is, his power of preserving life. When it comes to the
_last sigh_, the last effort of the diaphragm by which the chest
is closed forever, we must bid adieu to life. In yielding up that, we
have in very truth yielded up the ghost.

This is no joke, as you see, and it would not do to be caught
unprepared, with an inexorable necessity hanging over one, which never
allows a moment's respite. The blood acts like a reasonable being,
therefore, in laying up his stores of combustible in reserve. Moreover,
whether he has done so or not, the fire must go on all the same; that
is absolutely necessary; and if he has no spare fat to feed it with,
when, from any cause, the stomach leaves off working, he makes use of
anything he can lay his hands upon.

I know a story on this subject which will amuse you.

There lived, in the reign of Francis I. of France, an honest countryman,
of Perigord, named Bernard Palissy. At that time everybody could not
afford to have earthenware plates, as they have now. It was a
manufacture of which only the Italians had the secret, and Bernard,
who knew something of the matter, from being a glass-worker, took it
into his head to try and find it out entirely by himself. So, without
asking anybody's advice, he turned potter, built ovens, picked up wood
as he could, manufactured his first pots, whether well or ill, made
a beginning, and waited. He had fifteen or sixteen years of it before
he succeeded; fifteen or sixteen years of ruinous experiments, which
would have discouraged a less sturdy heart than his. But he, after he
had succeeded in picking up some money by his church windows, returned
to his work with unconquerable perseverance, insensible to poverty,
deaf to the ridicule of neighbors, and unmoved by the abuse of his
wife, who was furious, as you may suppose, at being forced to play the
heroine without having the least turn for it. And one fine day there
was a grand uproar in La Chapelle-Biron (that was the name of his
village). "Bernard Palissy has gone mad," said everybody; "he is burning
up his house to bake his pots." And upon my word it was true! Wood
happened to be wanting while a batch was in the oven, and Bernard
having begun by using up the garden palisades, took next the large
tables, and at last the floor of the house! What his wife had to say,
I leave you to judge; as for him he listened to nothing; but, fixing
his eyes on the insatiable furnace, threw in one thing after another,
caring only for the risk to his handiwork. The ceiling would have
followed the floor had not his pots been sufficiently baked without.

And thus, and thus, does the blood, when combustible matter fails him!
He demolishes the house, and throws it, bit by bit, into the fire. The
fat goes into it naturally enough, as I have already explained to you.
It is the fuel-store of the house. It was put by on purpose, and may
be used up without injury. Then comes the turn of the muscles; more
useful without being indispensable. Those are Bernard Palissy's
palisades one may contrive to do without them. They melt away, so to
speak, after a few days' fast, and you find yourself what people call
"nothing but skin and bone." But then, if this condition is prolonged,
and the exhausted flesh cannot supply the demand, the blood does not
hesitate a moment. He boldly falls upon the most important organs,
without stopping to consider; he, too, is devoted solely to his work,
and that, like the baking of pots, never comes to an end by being
completed; if external help does not arrive in time, the house soon
becomes uninhabitable, and life slips away. The man dies of hunger.

But in the same way that poor Bernard Palissy was in reality working,
all the time, for his wife and children, whose future well-being he
strove for as the final end of all his efforts, though at the risk of
letting them sleep under the bare heavens; so the blood was laboring
up to the last moment for that very life which he at last turned out
of doors; and the work of destruction which caused its final departure
has had in reality the effect of prolonging its stay. Without it, all
would have been over long before.

LETTER XXIV.

THE WORK OP THE ORGANS.

Thus much is settled, then. It is the blood which sets everything in
motion throughout the body. The organs are idlers who would do nothing
but for him; they only work when goaded on, if I may use the expression,
by that fire--always on the point of going out--which he is perpetually
coming back to rekindle, thanks to the oxygen he carries with him from
the lungs.

This will enable me to explain many things, which, although not new
to you, you have probably never tried to account for before.

To begin with: do you remember what happened to you the other day,
when you tried to overtake your mischievous brother in running, and
he, taking advantage of his school-boy legs, led you mercilessly through
all the garden walks, without having the grace even to let you catch
him at the end? You were quite out of breath; your heart beat so rapidly
it almost hurt you; and you were so hot that the perspiration poured
in great drops down your face, so that your mamma, quite frightened,
took you up in her arms and carried you to the fire; for the coolness
of evening was coming on, and a little girl drenched with perspiration
is soon chilled.

Tell me now, what connection was there between your overrunning yourself
in a race and the extraordinary degree of heat which came over you so
soon? Your cheeks were cool and fresh when you began to run; what made
them so red all at once, and especially at a moment when the air was
cool and fresh in the garden?

You open your eyes in surprise; you had never thought of this. No!
that is just the way with little girls. They run; they get hot; it
seems as natural as warming oneself in the sun, and they never ask why
it is so.

Yet you could almost tell me the "why" yourself, if you stopped to
think about it, now that you are what your school-boy brother would
say "_up to a thing or two;_" but to save time, I will help you.

You run as a bird flies, without thinking about it. Nevertheless, if
you could see with a magic glass all that takes place in your body
while those active little feet are carrying it like a feather across
the garden, you would be perfectly amazed. One of these days, when we
have finished our present history, I will tell you that other one,
which is equally worth the trouble. It is enough for the present to
know, that a very complicated piece of work is being carried on there,
in which almost all the muscles of the body take part at the same time,
contracting and relaxing in turn, like so many springs, of which each
either drives forward or holds back a part of the machine. In fact,
while your eyes and thoughts are fixed on the butterfly which is
flitting away from you through the air, there is going on within you
such an unheard-of outlay of efforts as could never be got out of our
idlers if the terrible steward did not lash them severely.

Now, his lash, as we have said often enough, is that eternal fire, the
materials of which he conveys to all parts of the body. On those special
occasions, therefore, he is obliged to make his fire burn much more
briskly than usual--exactly like railway engine-drivers, who increase
the heat of their fire to get up steam in proportion to the speed they
wish to go.

From this you will understand that it is no great wonder that your
small frame should get heated from such work as racing and chasing;
and that if you pursue it too long, the perspiration which comes out
all over you is sufficiently explained.

This is not all, however. The fire, whose strength has to be increased,
naturally requires a larger amount of combustible matter than before,
and forasmuch as there is only a certain fixed quantity in each drop
of blood, whenever the muscles want more than usual, the blood itself
must flow to them in greater abundance. Now if it were a question of
supplying only one part of the body (as it is, you may remember, of
supplying the stomach during the progress of digestion), he might
contrive to accomplish his task there by neglecting it elsewhere, and
overflow one organ at his ease, at the expense of all the rest. But
in this case he is wanted everywhere in the same abundance. It is not
a question of taking one muscle's share for the benefit of another.
From one end of the body to the other, all want to be deluged at once.
And remember that these exigencies do not bring a drop more blood into
the body. How is he to get out of his difficulty then, this overwhelmed
steward of ours? Well! just as your mamma manages, my dear, when there
is more to do than usual in the house;--by running quicker than ever
from the cellar to the garret, and from your room to your papa's! That
is called doubling oneself; and this gallant blood doubles itself to
some purpose. He runs and runs and runs, arrives in hurried streams,
and returns full gallop, passing and repassing through the heart, which
empties and fills itself in sudden jerks. Unluckily, the poor heart
is a delicate sort of person, who does not like having his habits
disarranged, and this forced work soon makes him desperate. The other
day, in his despair, he knocked with all his strength against the walls
of his little chamber, to warn his young mistress that he could bear
no more, and that they were both of them in danger. In fact, you ought
to know that if one was infatuated enough to go on running too long,
one might die of it. When you learn ancient history, you will probably
be told of what happened to the soldier of Marathon, who flew like an
arrow from the field of battle to the gates of Athens, that he might
tell his fellow-citizens a quarter of an hour earlier, that his country
was saved; and he fell dead on his arrival.

But it is not the heart only which suffers by this mad career of the
blood. During each journey it performs it passes through the lungs,
which in their turn are forced to play with hasty jerks. And this is
well for our good steward; for the lungs, filling with air at each
descent of the diaphragm (if you remember what we have said before),
more air, and consequently more oxygen, comes in, and the blood has
by this means a larger stock on hand, ready to help him out in the
unusual waste which is just then going on in the muscles. I spoke just
now of railway steam-engines. See how self-supporting ours is! The
greater the amount of fire wanted, the faster the blood flows; and the
faster the blood flows, the oftener does the coffer re-fill itself,
whence comes the supply of oxygen requisite for keeping up the fire.
All this goes on at once, by one impulse, and the balance between the
receipts and expenditure settles itself of its own accord. How thankful
many families would be if their money-chest would but fill itself in
the same way--in exact proportion as they spend the cash! There is
only one slight drawback, which is, that the diaphragm gets tired with
the unaccustomed gallop it is thus forced into. It falls into
convulsions, therefore, like its neighbor the heart, and the breathing
is stopped, from having been driven too rapidly. An excellent example
for people who want to spend too much at once; showing that Nature
herself cries out against it, even when the only thing wanted is
atmospheric air.

Now, run if you dare! And, to tell you the truth, it would be a great
pity if you did _not_ dare; for our good God has made little children
for running. They have nimbler blood than we older grandfathers, more
elastic lungs, and consequently more oxygen to spend at a time. But you
must confess that it is a great pity we should run all our lives as many
people do, without having the slightest idea of these admirable
contrivances, thanks to which we are enabled to do it. We can run all
the same, it is true, without the knowledge, the little child as easily
as the little roebuck, which sets a similar machine in motion. But it is
no use talking about the little roebuck; it cannot learn what God has
done for it, but the little child can, if he will. Furthermore, there is
nothing to be really alarmed about, for those great commotions only
occur when we have committed excess; and it is a very good thing, in a
general way, for the blood to give us a stroke of his lash from time to
time. I told you lately that the fire which sets the organs to work is
life; and it is no misfortune to be a little more alive than usual.
Besides which, this increased activity of the internal fire does not
serve us in running only. Every time that a man makes an effort; every
time he lifts a weight, or handles a tool, the blood rushes forward to
deluge the muscles that are thus called into play; the heart beats more
quickly, and the air streams in greater abundance into the lungs. Look
at a man chopping wood. If the log resists too much, if for a minute or
two the man has to strike blow after blow without stopping, you will
soon see him panting for breath, just as if he had been running a race.
On the other hand, he will have gained something from chopping his log
besides the right of warming himself before it at the fire. Blood does
not carry fire only into the muscles; he supplies them with nourishment
also, does he not? Every drop of blood deposits its little offering as
it goes by, and consequently the greater the number that pass along, the
richer is the harvest for the muscle. Look, accordingly, at the laboring
classes. How much healthier and stronger they are than those who do not
work! I speak, of course, of working with one's limbs generally; for
those poor girls who work from morning to night, sitting on their
chairs, are none the better for it, but, on the contrary, worse. There
are also certain worthy fellows who, like myself at the present moment,
drive a pen over sheets of paper for half a day at a time, whose muscles
never get any bigger for it, that is quite clear. Moreover, one
condition has to be fulfilled, which unhappily is not always done. The
more people labor, the more they ought to eat. To you, who have just
been looking at the drama that is performed in the body every time a
muscle is set in motion, this is obvious enough. There is no fire
without smoke, says the proverb. It would have been much better to
have said,--there is no fire without fuel;--and the fuel for our fire
is, as you know, what we eat. Try if you can get one stove to burn
more brightly than another, if you have put less fuel into it. Yet,
alas! this is what many poor wretches are obliged to do but too often;
and then the blood, instead of feeding their muscles, consumes them,
for the reasons I gave, in telling you the story of Bernard Palissy.
Think of this, oh my dear child, when you are grown up, and never
grudge those who work for you their proper share of food.

Here I see many other lessons crowding up, out of what you have just
learnt.

And first Nature herself, taken as you find her, shows you that manual
labor is, for us, a most beneficial condition of existence; that it
brings about a re-doubling, an exaltation of life; and that
consequently, we have no need to look down upon those who gain their
bread, as we word it, by the sweat of their brows. I told you this
before, in speaking of the hand, which is of so much more use to those
people than to you; and I repeat it now for another reason, viz.:
because labor elevates him who undertakes it, and creates a real
physical nobility. Barbarians in old times, who knew nothing noble nor
grand but war, despised labor, and left it to their slaves; so much
so, that the name _servile labor_, _i.e._ the labor of slaves,
has stuck to it in some places. As for war, the lot of the ancient
nobility, I scarcely dare to say much against it, however much I should
like to do so on some accounts. For, after all, so long as there are
ruffians to trample on the weak, one is only too glad to find brave
men ready to risk their lives in keeping such rascals down: so long
as there are wolves, we must needs keep shepherds' dogs. But in spite
of everything, the best that can be said in favor of war is, that it
remains a sad but inevitable necessity, and that to get rid of it,
more is wanting than the wish. What a contrast to labor--that contest
of Man with Nature;--that merciful and fruitful war, where victories
are not estimated like other victories, by the number of the slain,
but which, on the contrary, scatters fresh life around it as it spreads;
fresh life in the laborer himself, by the very act of work, fresh life
around him without, by the fruits that work produces!

Between the man who dies in slaying others, and the man who keeps
others alive by living longer himself, it seems cruel to make invidious
comparisons; but if it be just to honor the first out of respect for
the cause he has defended, whenever that cause is respectable--it is,
to say the least of it, not less just to do equal honor to the second.

But let us come down from these philosophic heights, and return to
you, dear child; to you, who have nothing to do with war, its massacres
or its laurels.

It is true, however, that you have nothing to do either, with chopping
wood, and I am not asking you to undertake any such thing. But in the
life of a woman, from the time of her childhood upwards, a thousand
things arise for the hands to do, and the question is, how often you
are likely to feel ashamed of not sending for the servants to do them?
Avoid this false and fatal idea as much as possible. The work of the
hands dishonors no one; it is honorable. To cast it aside altogether
is to make yourself smaller instead of greater; to deprive yourself
of one of the glories and the joys of life. If a good thing is set
before you at dinner, do you send for the servants to eat it? If an
occasion arises for making the blood circulate more rapidly in your
veins, and of increasing the strength and life with, in you into the
bargain, why make _them_ a present of it? Especially when it
cannot be an agreeable present considering that good servants have
plenty of such opportunities from morning to night every day.

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