The History of a Mouthful of Bread

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ORDER 7. _Pachydermata (thick-skinned)_.

In Greek _pachus_ means thick, and _derma_ skin. _Pachyderms_,
therefore, are thick-skinned animals. It is rather a vague denomination,
as you perceive, and does not tell us much about them; but it appears
that it was not very easy to find a better term. For my own part I
should be very much puzzled to find a name really suitable for such an
irregular company as this, in which all the huge beasts of the
earth--the elephant, the rhinoceros, the hippopotamus--are heaped one
upon the other, side by side with the horse, the ass, and the hog;
begging your pardon for an ugly word.

All these creatures live on vegetables, with the exception of the hog,
to whom nothing comes amiss; or who, in other words, is _omnivorous_,
like the bear, and also another member of the class _Mammalia_, which I
do not name for fear of making you blush at your companionship. This
assures you that, in the order of the _Pachydermata_, the digestive
apparatus is very fully developed. The horse, for instance, has a very
voluminous stomach, which extends much farther back than the point at
which the oesophagus empties itself; and in which, on close examination,
a sort of contraction is observed which appears to divide it in half,
producing the false effect of there being two stomachs. But, after all,
we do not find, even in this case, any essential difference to remark
upon in the internal arrangements; it is always the teeth we must look
at if we want to have something to say. There, indeed, we have only to
choose; nature has indulged herself in all manner of fantastic freaks.

To begin with the elephant, the grand master of the order, he presents
us with one of the most oddly-furnished jaws in existence. Every one
knows those two enormous tusks which protrude from his mouth, and which
furnish human industry with nearly the whole store of ivory it has
need of. Those two teeth are the largest, beyond comparison, of any
in the animal kingdom; yet they are two merely ornamental teeth,
perfectly useless in the operation of eating, and very ruinous into
the bargain to the proprietor. All those stores of the blood which
furnish the materials for ivory pass into these tusks, and, as often
happens to people who give way to a taste for luxuries, there is nothing
left wherewith to provide the animal with serviceable teeth. Those
tusks of the elephant are nothing but his upper incisors, the only
ones, observe, which curve in coming out of his jaw. In the lower jaw
he has no incisors at all; canine teeth are entirely wanting; and by
way of dental apparatus, this meagerly-furnished mouth possesses on
each side of either jaw one or two molars, enormous in size, but not
of ivory. They are composed of a number of enamelled upright layers
of tooth-substance (_dentine_), soldered together with a bony
cement; and these are our giant's only resource for chewing the grass,
young shoots, and leaves of trees, which are his natural food.
[Footnote: These teeth are nevertheless very efficient grindstones.]
As a consolation, he has the glory of knowing that he possesses the
very finest teeth in the world, the terror of all who approach him;
and I can compare him to nothing so well as to a vain woman, who is
contented to live on potatoes that she may wear fine clothes and excite
the envy of her neighbors.

The hippopotamus also has incisors in the upper jaw, which curve as
they come out of the mouth; but these never attain anything like the
size of the elephant's tusks, neither do they hinder the development
of the other teeth, of which this animal has a very respectable
collection. The upper incisors bend downward; those in the lower jaw
stand out horizontally, and terminate in sharp points like
plough-shares; and indeed the hippopotamus uses them for tearing up
the ground in order to get at the roots which form its nutriment. These
are, besides, formidable weapons, with which when enraged the animal
can tear even boats in pieces; for, as you are aware, the hippopotamus
is almost amphibious, and browses on water-plants, and lives in the
great rivers of Africa, its native country. Its name alone would have
told you this had you understood Greek; [Footnote: _Ippos_, a horse, and
_potamos_, a river. The Greeks, who had seen the hippopotamus in the
Nile, in Egypt, named it the river-horse; as afterwards the Romans
called the elephant the ox of Lucania, because they first saw it in
Lucania during the war with Pyrrhus.] but I have no complaint to make
this time, for it was the Greeks themselves who gave it. You would find
it very awkward, would you not? if you had to breakfast at the bottom of
the Thames, and could not swallow a morsel without having your nose
filled with water? But the hippopotamus labors under no such
inconvenience. Its nostrils are provided with two little doors, which it
closes at will, and behind this screen the lungs keep quite quiet while
the animal goes backwards and forwards in the water. There is generally
a hippopotamus in every large menagerie. The next time you visit one
look at him. You will see him with a large stomach almost trailing on
the ground: and no wonder; he needs plenty of room in which to stow away
all the canes, reeds, and water-plants from the bottoms of rivers, which
are not very nutritious food. Accordingly the stomach of the river-horse
presents the appearance not only of two compartments, like that of the
true horse, but looks as if it were divided into three or four.

To conclude my account of this animal, I must add that the ivory of
its teeth is even more beautiful than that of the elephant's tusks,
and that dentists carve it into very magnificent teeth for their
patients. This is not a matter to interest you much at present, but
we never know what may happen. I advise you, however, never to make
use of hippopotamus's teeth; they turn yellow very quickly, and, when
people are driven to buy teeth, the least they can try for, is to get
good-looking ones for their money.

I should like to say something about the rhinoceros while we are on
the colossal tribes, but it is a very unsatisfactory subject. The
animal has no canines, sometimes no incisors even; sometimes it has
as many as thirty-six teeth, according to the species, as naturalists
aver; and this is all I have to say about this great lump of flesh,
so misshapen outside, yet so regularly formed within. He it is who
especially deserves the title _pachydermata_, his skin being so
hard and thick that bullets glance off its surface. But this has nothing
to do with our present subject, any more than the horn upon his nose,
whose turn for description may come if I ever give you the history of
the skin and all connected with it.

The hog also has canines, and very strong ones; but it is in the wild
state, when it is called a boar, that these appear in their real form.
There we find them projecting out of the mouth with a curve, as is so
commonly seen among the _pachydermata_, forming those terrible,
sharp, and pointed tusks which have been so often fatal to the hunter.
The wild boar of the forest is supposed to be the original ancestor
of the domestic pig; and if, as is probable, this is really the case,
we have here a remarkable instance of the effect of man's treatment
upon the organisation of the animals he collects around him. The wild
boar lives only on fruits and roots, which, like the hippopotamus, he
tears up with his tusks, those safeguards of his, amid the many perils
of his life in the woods. In the service of man, on the contrary, he
becomes lazy, cowardly, and greedy; unlearns his energy and
combativeness, eats all that is offered to him in the trough, even
meat, when it happens to be thrown in; and, in order to do this
moreeasily, has recalled toward his mouth those formidable war-tusks of
his, so tremendous as weapons, so useless as teeth; has, in fact,
turned his sword into a fork. It is the case of a Tartar degenerated
into a Chinaman. [Footnote: China, about which we have heard a great
deal of late years, has been several times invaded by the warrior
hordes of Tartary. But at each time, unto the second and third
generations, the vanquishers have taken the effeminate manners, the
costume and the usages of the vanquished, and so many conquests have
only resulted in converting millions of Tartars into Chinese.]

This suggests to me an idea relative to the horse, the last important
member of the _pachydermata_ which remains to be spoken of. It
also has its canines, but very small ones; they disappear, so to speak,
in a large vacancy between the incisors and the molars, where man
inserts the bit, by means of which the animal has been subdued. Small
as these are, however, these canines indicate that the horse might eat
flesh, canine teeth being the distinctive attribute of the carnivorous
mammals. I have read somewhere, but I do not remember where, that an
unusual development of strength could be produced in the horse by
feeding it on flesh; and the old Greek poets write of a king [Footnote:
Diomed, King of Thrace] in the barbarous ages who gave his horses,
men for food. If I knew some rich professor who was inclined to spend
money in the investigation of a curious fact, I would advise him to
set apart a sum for putting horses on a meat diet, from sire to son,
gradually increasing the quantity; and I would boldly warrant that in
the course of successive generations the canines would become so large
as to impede the entrance of the bit into the mouth, and, moreover,
would make it rather a ticklish office for the groom to place it there.
But let us set aside the teeth the horse might possibly have, in order
to examine those it has already. There are six incisors in each jaw;
these are long and rather projecting teeth, by examining which, the
age of the horse can be detected from certain marks which appear in
them from year to year. The molars are flat, square, furrowed with
bars of enamel, marking out more or less distinct crescents; perfectly
constructed, in short, for chewing hay and oats. Nevertheless, I should
never be surprised to see the enamel crescents become sharp-cutting
in our rich professor's stable; so skillful is the unseen Architect
who created animals, in altering the house when the tenant changes his
habits.

ORDER 8. _Ruminantia (ruminants)._

I shall retain through life a pleasant recollection of the
_ruminants_. Through them I obtained the first prize for natural
history which was ever given in France to the pupils of the learned
university. It is thirty years ago since this happened, and I own,
without any false modesty, that even now the word _ruminant_ rings
very agreeably in my ear. It reminds me of one of the proudest moments
of my life, of the honor done to me by the illustrious Geoffroy St.
Hilaire, when he called me, a little college urchin, up to him, that
he might have a nearer view, as he said, of the baby-professor who had
spoken so well on ruminants. Yes, it is more than thirty years ago, for
alas! it was in 1831. There needed no less an event, as I have told
you before, than the revolution of 1830 in France to induce the big-wigs
of education to sacrifice two hours per week in one class to the study
of natural history. Yes, my dear child, it is only that short time ago
since natural history became one of the subjects of study in French
colleges; and the gray-haired men of the present day finished their
education, as it is called, without having learnt a single word of
what I am now taking the trouble to teach you, a mere child. You see
you have come into the world just at the right time, and will be able
to instruct others in your turn. But before giving lessons to other
people you must first finish learning your own. Forgive me this
involuntary reference to a happy time when I was not much more rational
than you are. And now, let us return to our ruminants--those dear,
good beasts, the nourishing fathers of the human race.

LETTER XXXII.

MAMMALIA--_continued_.

ORDER 8. _Ruminants--continued_.

Every created thing has an appointed part to perform; but there are
some mysterious parts of which we cannot understand the drift. That
of the ruminants, however, is so clearly marked out, that we detect
it at a glance.

To qualify myself for supplying your young mind with the food I am
going to offer it to-day, I have been obliged, my dear child, to browse
in a good many books of which you could have understood but little
yourself; and I have been forced to ruminate a long time upon what I
have read, and to digest it slowly in my head, which I may say, without
vanity, is of larger capacity than yours; no great wonder at my age.
Now, if I have succeeded in my undertaking, you will benefit by all
the work which has been going on in my mind for the purpose of feeding
yours without over-fatigue to it; and I shall almost have the right
to say that its nourishment has been derived from me. My lamp could
tell you what it has sometimes cost me to supply a single page which
might instruct, without repelling you.

Now, this is precisely what the _ruminant_ does. The part he has
to perform is to collect in the meadows a sort of food, which would
disgust less well-organized stomachs than his own, to work it well up
within him, and to give it back in a more palatable and less
indigestible form. The little flesh-eaters (_carnivora_) come
afterwards to the feast, and the feast is himself!

The whole history, then, of the ruminant is to be read in his stomach.
His real office is to digest, and in fact he devotes the best hours
of his days to the perfecting of that beneficent labor, on which the
life of so many weak stomachs depends. Have you ever amused yourself
by watching a large ox lying down in a meadow? Long after he has
finished grazing, his jaw continues to work, turning round and round
like the grindstone of a painter when he is rubbing down his colors.
Look, and you will see that he will remain there for hours together,
motionless and contemplative, absorbed in this incomprehensible
mastication, rolling about in his throat from time to time some
invisible food. Do not laugh at him, however. As you sec him there he
is performing his part in life, he is _ruminating_.

To ruminate is to chew over again what has been already swallowed;
and, however droll this may seem to you, it is the business which all
ruminants are born to. You remember the monkey's pouch, which serves
him as a larder, whence he takes out his provisions as he wants to
eat. The ruminant has an immense pouch of the same kind, into which,
while he is grazing, he hastily conveys large masses of half-bitten
grass. You probably think he is eating when he has his head down in
the grass; but you are mistaken. This is only a preparatory work; he
is hastily heaping up in his larder the food he intends to eat
by-and-by; only his larder, instead of being, like the monkey's, in
his cheeks, where, indeed, there would not have been half room enough
for those great bundles he tucks in, is in the middle of his body,
close to the extremity of the oesophagus, whose lower wall, being slit
at that part, becomes an imperfectly secure tube, ready to burst open
under pressure, and allow the food to escape between the edges of the
slit; these, otherwise, remaining naturally closed. As soon as the
large bundles of grass come to this part, they press against the walls
of the tube, which they by this means separate, and fall into the
provision-pouch, which bears the name of paunch, or grass-pocket, in
fact. As soon as the paunch is well filled, and the animal sure of his
dinner, he lies down in some quiet corner, where he proceeds gravely
with the important act, which is the real object of his existence. A
little below the entrance to the paunch, and communicating both with
it and the canal of the oesophagus, is a second receptacle, which old
French naturalists, not being much acquainted with Greek, named the
_cap_, on account of its fancied resemblance to the caps worn on
the head, and which we call 'king's hood' or 'honey-comb bag.' This
second stomach now contracts (at least so it is supposed), and thus
retains, as if with a closed fist, a portion of the grass accumulated
in the paunch: of this it forms a pellet, which it sends back into the
oesophagus, and the oesophagus, by continued contractions from below
upwards, returns it to the mouth, where at last the grassy lump is
chewed in good earnest, and to some purpose. There is no necessity for
hurry; the ruminant has no other business on the face of the earth but
this, and thus hour after hour passes away, the food pellets rising
one after another to the onslaught of the teeth. Nor do they go back
again until they have been reduced by long mastication into an almost
liquid paste, which glides through the oesophagus without forcing open
the slit, and falls straight into a third pouch, called by old Frenchmen
the _leaf_, on account of certain large folds, some what like the leaves
of a book, which line the interior; and known to us as the _manyplies_.
From this stomach, No. 3, this grass-pap passes into a fourth and last
bag, which is the real stomach, and where the final work of digestion is
accomplished. This fourth pouch also has a pretty little name of the
old-fashioned sort, like the three others; it is called the _reed_ or
_rennet-bag_, from the property it possesses, in the calf, of turning
milk into curds: and of his four stomachs this is the only one which the
ruminant makes use of at first. As long as the young animal is nursed by
its mother, the other compartments remain inactive and small in size;
they neither grow nor exercise their functions until it begins to eat
grass. Indeed, they would probably entirely disappear, if any one would
go to the expense of keeping the animal on milk all its life. If it
ceased to have anything to ruminate, nature would certainly lose no time
in relieving it of its useless workshop of rumination.

As it is right to give every one his due, I will mention that we owe
our accurate knowledge of this simple and ingenious mechanism of
_rumination_ to the labors of Flourens, a scientific Frenchman,
who is still alive, and who has made a great many interesting inquiries
into the subject we are now considering, _i. e._, the life of
animals. He is a very clever man into the bargain--so perfect a master
of his own language, that the French Academy has felt itself justified
in opening its doors to him--an unheard-of honor for a member of the
Academy of Sciences. And yet, in spite of all this, I heartily
congratulate you that the discovery of the _paunch_, the _cap_, the
_leaf_, and the _rennet-bag_, was not delayed for his arrival. He is
just the man who might have been tempted, in his capacity of profound
scholar, to have hunted up for them in the _Jardin des racines grecques_
[Footnote: Your brother can tell you about the _Jardin des racines
grecques_. It is a charming little book, of which every generation of
collegians has learnt, by heart, the commencement; but I have never
known one, even among the most intrepid, who had ever been to the end of
it.], four magnificent names, which would only have bewildered you.

Beyond the rennet-bag there is no change of conformation to note,
except that the intestinal tube is naturally much longer than ours,
on account of the difference of food: as a general rule, it is ten or
twelve times the length of the body. The sheep, who is able to pick
up a living in the poorest pastures, is indebted for this inestimable
power, which makes him the special blessing of dry and barren countries,
to a still further peculiarity of organization; with him the intestinal
tube is twenty-eight times the length of the body.

We have seen among the _Carnivora_, whose jaws have so much work
to do, that the condyles of the jawbone are sunk deeply into the fossa
of the temporal bone. The ruminant, whose peaceful mouth is formed for
contending only with grass, is organized quite differently.

Here the condyle is flattened, and the fossa of the temporal bone very
shallow, presenting to the condyle an almost flat surface, so that the
jawbone is enabled to revolve with ease for the better mastication of
the pellets of grass. This conformation is also to be seen in the
_pachydermata_ who feed upon vegetables. In the horse, especially,
whose food is almost the same as that of the ox, the _articulation_
(as this joining of the condyle to the temporal bone is called) of the
jaw, is also nearly identical; and it is the same with the teeth, with
very trifling variations, those of all ruminants are constructed on
the same plan as in the horse. The canines only require a separate
notice.

But first I must tell you that, by some special privilege, the reason
for which I do not undertake to explain, the order of ruminants is the
only one containing animals with horns on their foreheads. Stags,
goats, reindeer, chamois, gazelles, roebucks, oxen, buffaloes, all the
beasts with horned foreheads, belong to the ruminants. Indeed, this
fact would form a very convenient mark of distinction between them and
other animals, were there not exceptions to it. Some ruminants have
no horns; and then, as if in compensation for the deficiency, we find
them provided with canines in the upper jaw, in addition to those
below.

The ruminant which has the most beautiful canines is the musk-deer,
a pretty little animal inhabiting the highlands of Central Asia, like
the chamois of the Alps. But now that you know who he is, you will
probably often be tempted to wish he had never existed; for it is from
a small pouch below his belly that people obtain that odious musk of
which Oriental beauties are so fond, and which even certain
strong-nerved ladies of our own country are guilty of using in public,
to the great detriment of general health. But enough of this; our
business is with the canines of the musk-deer. They project with a
descending curve from the upper jaw, and would give the animal the
very false appearance of a small wild boar, but for the great delicacy
of its legs, which are more slender than even those of our roebuck,
to whom, with the exception of the horns, it bears a close resemblance,
as its name implies.

After the musk-deer comes the large family of camels and llamas, which
represent--the former in Asia and Africa, the latter in America--the
irregular groups of ruminants which have canines instead of horns, and
which seem to be placed as intermediates between true ruminants and
the pachydermata. They form the connecting link between the horse and
the ox, and men prefer employing them as beasts of burden to using
them as butcher's meat; though one could eat them in their own country
with less disgust than Europeans feel in making a meal of horseflesh;
so that they might be a very acceptable resource in many cases. The
real fact is, that ruminants with horns and without upper canines have
more delicate flesh than the others, and seem more especially destined
to be eaten. Yet if one had only to look at the stomach, which is,
after all, the distinctive characteristic of the order, camels and
llamas would stand in the first rank as ruminants. Besides the usual
character of four stomachs, their paunch and honeycomb-bag are furnished
with large cells which act as reservoirs, and fill with water whenever
the animal has the chance of drinking freely, and from whence in time
of drought he draws it up into his mouth and swallows it. This is what
makes the camel so valuable to the wandering tribes in the great deserts
of Africa and Asia. He is the only animal who can pass several days
under the burning sun of Sahara without drinking--or rather without
appearing to do so--for he carries his provision of water concealed
from all eyes in the recesses of his body. I dare say you have often
heard stories of Arabs dying of thirst who have opened the stomachs
of their camels in search of a last draught of water. It must be a
terrible thirst to drive a man to such an extremity; for, as you may
imagine, one could not expect the water there to be either fresh or
clear, to say nothing of the great risk there would generally be of
finding the reservoir empty. Such an extreme is never resorted to till
water has failed for a long time, and all the goatskin bottles have
been emptied; and in such a ease it is but too likely that the camel
has followed his master's example, and emptied his water-skins for his
own use. But this is only half the internal fittings of the "ship of
the desert," as the Arabs call him. In the desert it is often as
difficult to find food as water; and nature has equally provided for
this. The hump you see rising upon the camel's back in your
picture-books is his safeguard against starvation. It is a huge mass
of fat. I need say no more. You will remember Mr. Liebeg's pig, which
lived 160 days upon its own bacon. Without going quite such lengths
as that, the camel can keep up his fire for a long time upon the fuel
which the blood obtains from this blessed hump. Since we are talking
of this animal, and he takes a remarkable place in a history of
nutrition, I ought to tell you that camels are classed into two families
by their hump: there is the camel, properly so called, which has two
humps, and the dromedary, which has but one. This latter did not require
such a supply of provisions as the other, for he is very much swifter
of foot, and consequently his journeys are more speedily performed.

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