The History of a Mouthful of Bread

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This discovery of the globules of the blood, was destined to throw
great light upon the way in which the _nutrition of the organs_
was carried on. Modern chemists, who are always fond of investigation,
have examined what they are made of, and can find little else in them
but _albumen_. Out of our 127 ounces of globules, 125 are albumen;
and these, with the 70 ounces which we found before in the serum, make
up the 195 ounces (of albumen) which I told you were contained in the
1,000 ounces of blood. Forgive me all these ounces and figures. Exact
accounts give exact information.

These globules, then, are composed almost entirely of albumen. Nearly
two-thirds of all the albumen in the blood is concentrated in them;
and you know now the use of albumen, viz., that it is the foundation
of all the buildings of which the blood is the architect. Everything
leads us to believe that the formation of globules in the blood is the
last touch given by nature to that magical provision begun in
thevegetable, continued in the stomach, and finished in the veins, to
which, in combination with carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, we
are indebted for the subsistence of every portion of our body. Thus
the blood-globules may be considered as albumen which has finished its
education, and is ready to go into the world; while the albumen of the
serum is, like our young friends, the generations in reserve, who are
still at school awaiting their turn.

This is more than a mere supposition. Scientific men have taken to
themselves, on their own authority, all sorts of rights over animals,
and we profit basely enough by their crimes--I will not withdraw the
word--in order to increase our knowledge. Accordingly, they conceived
the idea of opening the veins of animals, and allowing the blood to
flow until the victim was prostrate and motionless as a corpse. This
done, they proceeded to fill the exhausted veins with blood, similar
to that which had been withdrawn, and with the blood, life was seen
gradually to return, till the animal rose from the ground, walked, and
resumed its disturbed existence, as if nothing had happened. The
interesting part of the experiment to us is, that if serum only, without
globules, be restored to the unfortunate animal, it is of no use
whatever, and the corpse does not revive.

It is evident, then, that all the power and virtue of the blood lies
in the globules; and according as their number is great or small it
is "rich" or "poor," as it is called; and where their number is not
up to the mark, the blood acts more feebly on the organs, life is
calmer, and people are no longer troubled with emotions--in other
words, with violent heats of the blood. Hence the impassible character
of _lymphatic_ people, who often get on in the struggle of life
better than others, because they are never in a hurry, and know how
to wait for opportunities. You will occasionally hear the word
_lymphatic_, for it has become the fashion, and it is time for
me to explain it; but unluckily the explanation is not in its favor.

You remember those little scavengers we spoke about formerly, who came
from the depths of all the organs, carrying away with them the worn-out
building materials, and covering the surface of the body with an
inextricable net work of tiny canals. These canals are called
_lymphatic vessels_, in consequence of being filled with a liquid
which is called _lymph_ (_water_, in Latin), but why I cannot
tell you, for it is, in fact, simple _serum_. There was a very
simple way of ascertaining this by making out an inventory of the
contents of the _lymph_ liquid, and when this was done, they were
found to consist of water, albumen, and the salts of serum; there was
even a little fibrine; the only thing wanting was _globules_.

How the truant serum finds its way into the lymphatic vessels is
probably as follows:--I have already mentioned the inconceivable
delicacy of the capillary vessels, those last ramifications of our
arteries and veins. It needs all the impulsive power of the heart to
enable the blood to force its way through these narrow passages; and
minute as are the globules, it would seem that they have but just room
to pass, for in examining under the microscope a corner of the tongue
of a live frog, the globules have been seen doubling themselves up to
pass through the capillaries, resuming their natural form afterwards.

It was this, indeed, which made me tell you just now that their margins
were elastic. During this momentary crush, part of the serum being
forced on too fast, oozes through the wall of the over-filled
capillaries, as water oozes through the leathern pipes of a fire-engine,
and hence probably the appearance of serum or _lymph_ in the organs,
where it is immediately sucked up (i. e., _absorbed_) by the lymphatic
vessels. Now, you will easily understand that the larger the proportion
of serum in the blood, the greater will be the quantity to be expelled
in passing through the capillaries, and the more will the lymphatic
vessels swell. In such cases the temperament or constitution is said to
be _lymphatic_. If, on the contrary, the globules are in excess, the
lymphatic vessels receive less serum, and diminish in size. The
temperament is then called _sanguine_, as if there were no serum in the
blood. You shall be judge yourself, knowing what you now do, whether it
would not be more reasonable to call such temperaments _serous_ and
_globulous_. At any rate those names would give people an idea of the
real state of things, and teach them that there were such things as
globules in the blood.

[Footnote: Here is a summary of the contents of 1000 oz. of blood:--

Ounces.
Water................... 790
Serum. Albumen...................70 870
Salts.................... 10

Fibrine................... 3
Clot. Globules Albumen.. 125 130
Coloring matter...... 2 127
----
1000
----]

To conclude, I must give you an account of the two ounces which still
remain of the 127 of globules, albumen taking up only 125, as you know.
Those two poor little ounces--the remainder of the thousand with which
we started--would you believe it?--they alone have the honor of
conferring upon the blood its beautiful red color. They constitute the
coloring matter of the globules, and you will never guess its chief
element. It is iron; ay, actually iron, young lady--the iron of swords
and bayonets. We often accuse it of tingeing the earth with blood; and
you may now know further, that it reddens blood itself by way of
compensation. Do not trouble yourself as to where it comes from. Our
fields are full of it, our very plants have stores of it. It sometimes
happens that our digestive apparatus, put out of order by other
occupations, fails to make use of the amount of iron offered to it;
in which case the blood is discolored, and the face turns pallid as
wax: this is an illness requiring great care. If it should ever befall
you, you will not be surprised, after to-day's lesson, to hear the
doctor say that you must have some iron. But be easy--you will not
have to swallow it whole! If you will take my advice, you will obey
the doctor's orders as soon as you can.

Not that looking pale signifies any thing: indeed, some young ladies
think it an advantage. But it is no advantage to any body when the
blood-globules are distressed for want of their proper supply of iron,
and do their work grudgingly, like ill-fed laborers. Nothing can go
on without them, you know, and they are people whom it is not well to
leave too long out of sorts. Else languor comes on; languor which is
the beginning of death: and pray remember that iron, which so often
causes death, is equally useful for keeping it at bay. By sending it
to the discolored globules, you give them back their energy and
brilliancy together.

I have come here to the end of all that is known with any certainty
about these wonderful globules which are to us the medium of life.
Shall I go further, is the question, and take you with me into the
fields of supposition, so full of noxious weeds? And yet why not?
Science owes its present position to the praiseworthy rule of never
adopting any theory which is not supported by well-established facts;
and I would be the last to advise a change. Were I to tell you, what
I am now going to say to you, at a meeting of the British Association
of Science, they would turn me out of the room, and with very good
reason. Nothing ought to be taught there but what can be proved. But
this is of no consequence to you and me, and we have a right to amuse
ourselves a little, after having worked so hard.

Well, there is an idea which nothing shall ever drive out of my head,
however imperfectly it may be proved as yet; namely, that each of our
globules is an animated being; and that our life is the mysterious
result of these millions of lesser lives, each of them insignificant
in itself; in the same way that the mighty existence of a nation, is
a compound of crowds of existences, each, for the most part, without
individual importance. Take our own or any other country as an instance;
where millions of brains, many of them by no means first-rate in power,
go to form a national character, the highest (as each _nation_
is apt to think of itself) in the world. According to this idea, you
must be a sort of nation yourself, my dear child, which is gratifying
to think of on the whole.

This is much more extraordinary than what I told you some time ago,
of the individual life of the organs, each of which on this new system
would be a province in itself! Do not exclaim too hastily. Whether the
globules are animated or not, it is very certain, let me tell you,
that your life depends entirely upon them; that it is weakened if they
are weakened; that it revives with them; and that whether you attribute
individual life to them or not, makes no alteration in the fact: their
action upon you remains the same. And he must be a very clever man who
can show me the exact difference between action and life. Hereafter,
when we have descended the scale of the animal world together, and are
arrived at the study of what are called microscopic animals, you will
better understand the words which appear so strange to you now. What
little our feeble instruments have revealed to us so far, of the history
of those globules, places them almost on a level with those strange
creatures, inexplicable to us, which are found in innumerable
multitudes, in a variety of liquids. We trace in them the beginning
of organization; their form and size are alike in all individuals of
the same species; and species vary enough to induce one to believe,
that there is a necessary relation between an animal's way of life and
that of its globules. If the microscope has not yet caught them in any
overt living act, who can be surprised? it is only dead blood which
has been submitted to the test. They ought to be observed in the
exercise of their functions, in the living animal itself, as has been
done to some extent in the frog; and if our foolish chat could influence
scientific observers, I would say to them what M. Leverrier said years
ago to the astonished astronomers: "Look yonder; you ought to see a
light there with which you are not yet acquainted!"

I am carrying you a long way on the wings of my fancy, my dear child;
but have no fears; I will not let you fall. This life of our globules,
which would, after all, be only one mystery the more among many, opens
before our eyes a magnificent vista of the uniformity in the scheme
of creation; which goes on repeating itself, while enlarging its circles
to infinity. We may, all of us, be only so many globules of the great
invisible fabric of humanity, in which we go up and down one after
another; and those vast globes which our telescopes follow through
celestial space, may be but globules of one, as yet unknown, to which
the Almighty alone can give a name.

Take this page to your father, my dear child, if you do not understand
it rightly; and now, shake hands, my history is ended!

PART SECOND--ANIMALS.

LETTER XXIX.

CLASSIFICATION OF ANIMALS.

'It is dangerous to show man how much he resembles the beasts, without
at the same time pointing out to him his own greatness. It is also
dangerous to show him his greatness, without pointing out his baseness.
It is more dangerous still to leave him in ignorance of both. But it
is greatly for his advantage to have both set before him.'--_Pensees
de Pascal_.

The man who wrote that, my dear child, did not trouble himself much
about children. He was one of the gravest specimens of literary
genius--a man who can scarcely be said to have ever been a child
himself; for as the story goes, he was found one day, when only twelve
years old, inventing geometry, and his father only saved him from
trouble, by putting the great book of Euclid into his hands; and, at
sixteen, he wrote a treatise on _Conic Sections_, which was the
wonder of all the learned men of the day. I have not a very clear idea
of what Conic Sections are myself; but I tell you this to show that
Pascal was a very profound and learned man, under whose authority,
therefore, I am very glad to take shelter, now that I am going to set
before you the very startling points of resemblance which exist between
you and the beasts.

As to your greatness, it delights me to explain it to you. It is not
due to the handsome clothes you wear when you are going out, nor to
the luxurious furniture of mamma's drawing-room, but to the possession
of that young soul which is beginning to dawn within you, as the sun
rises in the morning sky, and pierces through the early mists; in that
growing intelligence which has enabled you to understand so far all
the pretty stories I have told you; in that fresh unsullied conscience,
which congratulates you when you have been good, and reproves you when
you have done wrong: all of them gifts which are not bestowed on the
lower animals, or certainly not to the same extent as upon you--gifts
by which you rise more and more above them, the more they are developed
in yourself. Your baseness--but, begging Pascal's pardon, I cannot
call it baseness--your connecting link with the brute creation lies
in those other gifts of God which you and they share in common--in
those wonders of your organization, which we shall now meet with in
them again, in full perfection at first, and that in every respect;
by which fact you may learn, if you never thought of it before, that
the lower animals come from the same creating hand as yourself, and
ought to be looked upon to some extent as younger brothers, however
distasteful such a notion may seem at first. Societies have been
established of late, both in France and England, for the protection
of animals; and a noble and honorable task they have undertaken, in
spite of the jokes that have been made at their expense. It is a
mischievous cavil to tell people who are doing good in one direction,
that more might have been done somewhere else. Everything hangs together
in the progress of public morality, and you cannot strike a blow at
cruelty to animals without at the same time making a hit at cruelty
to man. And the best argument in favor of the rights of beasts to
protection, will be found in the tour you and I are now going to make
together through the different classes of the animal creation.

Let us begin with the horse--one of the beasts which oftenest needs
our protection. Give him the mouthful of bread whose history we have
just finished. He accepts it as a treat, and needs no pressing to eat
it. And if it could tell you all its adventures afterwards, you would
find that you were listening to precisely the same story as your own
over again; that nothing was different, nothing wanting. First of
all--teeth to grind it, and a tongue to swallow it with, as a matter
of course. Next a _larynx_, which hides itself to avoid it, and an
oesophagus,* which receives it, just as in your case; a stomach with its
_gastric juices_, the same as yours, in bagpipe form, and its _pylorus_,
like your own; a _lesser intestine_, into which bile pours from a liver
like yours; _chyliferous vessels_ which suck up a milky chyle, as with
you; farther on a _large intestine_; and so on to the end. Nor is this
all:--the horse has also a heart, with its two _ventricles_, and its
double play of valves; a heart which the little girl in our tale might
confidently have exhibited to the engineers as her own, but that it
would have been somewhat too big, of course; into which heart, as into
ours, comes _venous_ blood, to be changed afterwards to _arterial_; in
lungs to which the air keeps rushing, forced thither by the see-saw
action of a _diaphragm_, as faithful a servant to him as to you.
And those lungs like our own, are a charcoal market: the same exchange
takes place there, of carbonic acid for oxygen, as in ours, an
unanswerable proof that the stove inside the horse burns fuel in the
same way as our own: and if you were to place the thermometer inside
his mouth (for we are polite enough to call it his mouth), it would
mark 37 1-2 degrees of heat (centigrade)--a difference from ourselves
not worth mentioning. Finally, if you examine his blood, you will meet
with the same _serum_ and _clot_, the whole company of _hydroclorates,
phosphates, carbonates, &c._, from which we shrank before, and globules
made like your own; having the same construction, and the same life, or
action, if you like it better. I need scarcely add that 100 oz. of its
_fibrine_ and _albumen_ contain:

Of carbon......... 63 oz.
Of hydrogen........ 7

This is understood all along as being the case everywhere, from man
down to the turnip; so that, like you, this noble animal, as the horse
is called, is in point of fact only so much carbon, so much water, and
so much air, joined to a handful of salt, which represents the earth's
share in the bodies of animals.

You must confess that, if we cannot quite call the horse a
fellow-creature, he is nevertheless very like us. And it is the same
with all those animals which man makes use of as his servants, and
which have really a sort of right to the protection of society, since
they form, to a certain extent, a portion of the human family. I do
not speak here of the dog, who pays his taxes, poor fellow, in his
quality of friend to man.

When I think of the almost identical organization of man and his
next-door neighbors, I am astonished how it could possibly have come
into the head of a certain learned individual (I will not mention his
name), when drawing up a plan of natural history, to give to man a
separate kingdom, as a sequel to the three kingdoms already
established--the mineral, vegetable, and animal. One might have forgiven
Pascal if such an idea had got into his head after writing his treatise
on Conic Sections; there being nothing in them to throw light on such
a subject. But in a naturalist, an observer who had spent his life in
the study of living creatures, the thing seems almost incredible.
Possibly he had reasons for what he did, but he certainly did not find
them in the subjects of his studies.

Forgive me, my dear child, for forgetting you in this fit of indignation
upon a point you cannot care much about. It leads me naturally enough
to my present business, which is none of the easiest, but you must
help me by paying attention. I am going to describe the _classification
of the animal kingdom_.

There are a terrible number of animals, as you know; and if we wish
to study them to any real purpose, we must begin by introducing some
sort of order into the innumerable crowds which throng, pell-mell,
around us for observation. We should otherwise never know where to
begin, or when we had come to an end.

There are many ways of setting a crowd in order, but they all go upon
the same plan. The individuals composing the crowd are parcelled off
into companies, each company having a distinguishing mark peculiar to
those who compose it. Thus the first division is into a few large
companies, which are afterwards subdivided into smaller ones, and those
into others still less, until the divisions have gone far enough. And
this is what is called a _classification_.

Let us imagine, as an example, a large crowd in a public garden; I
will soon classify it for you. I shall put the men on one side and the
women on the other. Then--to begin with the women--I shall subdivide
them into married and single. Then among married women I shall make
a company of mammas, and another of those who have no children. Among
the unmarried I shall have a group of those who have never been
married--girls, that is--and another of widows--those who were once
married, but are so no longer. Then, following the girls, I shall
separate them into tall and short. And among the short ones I shall
divide the brunettes from the blondes, and so I shall get at last to
a little blonde girl, whose classification (were she a soldier) in
military rank would be as follows:--_squadron_ of blondes; _company_ of
shorts; _battalion_ of girls; _regiment_ of unmarried women; _division_
of women. The division of men could be carried out in the same manner;
and thus we should classify our mob into complete military order. This
is easy enough, however; but the classifying of animals is a very
different affair, and I will tell you why. We ourselves require a
classification to study them by, though none was needed for their
creation. The Almighty has formed them all on one uniform plan, around
which He has, if I may so express it, lavished an infinity of
modifications separating species from species, yet without placing
between the different species those fixed barriers which we should
require now to enable us to classify them strictly. You who are learning
the pianoforte have perhaps been told the meaning of a _theme_ of
music--the first idea of the composer who follows it throughout the
piece from one end to the other, embroidering on it, as on a bit of
canvas, a thousand variations melting one into another. Such is pretty
nearly, if we may venture the comparison, the way in which we can
picture to ourselves the Almighty moving through the work of animal
creation. Step in afterwards and divide away into regiments and
battalions, if you please. Nature permits it, but she will never,
to accommodate your classifications, separate what in her is really
united.

There is still a way, however, and that is to do as I did just now in
the case of the crowd. To take, viz., only one _character_ (as we call a
distinguishing mark in natural history), and to throw together all the
individuals which possess it, the blondes, the shorts, the girls, &c. In
this way it may soon be done; but what is the result? You are in one
class, your eldest sister is in another, your mamma in a third, and your
brother in a different division altogether, a long way from you all.
Such a classification is called _artificial_, and you can see at once
that it is worthless.

The most natural plan is to put together those that are of the same
family; and the classifications made on this principle are called
_natural_ classifications.

It is a classification of this sort which has been adopted for the
animal kingdom. People have taken all the animals which possess in
common not one character only, but a collection of characters of the
most important kind, _dominant characters_, as they are called;
and of these animals they have formed, to begin with, large primary
groups; subdividing these afterwards according to the secondary
differences, which distinguish different species in the same group
from each other.

In this manner all the different sorts of animals are included in
different systematic divisions of one vast whole, through which it is
easy to find one's way, because there is a beginning and an end; and
in which animals of the same family are always grouped side by side.
Were I to mention all the divisions of this immense classification at
once, you would find the account a little long, and not very amusing.
We will go through them by degrees therefore, and, to simplify matters,
will, throughout the whole, only consider those particular characters
which are connected with our special study, the nourishment of life,
that is to say: so that you will always find yourself on well-known
ground.

I must tell you once for all, however, that it is with this as it is
with grammar. Here and there are--and it cannot be avoided--certain
exceptional cases which keep protesting timidly against the
arbitrariness of rules; but no matter; we must be contented with what
we can get, and be grateful into the bargain to those who have given
us this skillful classification, at once so ingenious and useful, in
spite of its inevitable imperfections. What is impossible is expected
of nobody. You could not understand, even if I wished to explain it
to you, the amount of science, labor and genius requisite for making
out that long list, which, tiresome as it may seem to children, is
absolutely beautiful in the eyes of learned men; too beautiful, perhaps,
and I will tell you why when we have finished. Meantime, as the best
reward we can give to those who have done us some great service is to
teach their names to children, I will tell you, before bidding you
good-bye, to whom we owe this classification, the details of which I
do not enter upon to-day.

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