The History of a Mouthful of Bread

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And now, surely, I have said enough about these parasites, whose very
name, I suspect, will make you shudder after my impertinent application
of it. Never mind: it depends entirely upon yourself to get rid of
whatever you find humiliating in the position I have hinted at. Do all
you can to bring happiness to the parents on whom you live at present,
and who give their life-blood so willingly for your good. God has made
you very different from those little animals who have neither heart
nor reason to guide them. Do not be like them, then, in conduct. By
a little obedience and love--child as you are--you can pay them back
what you owe, and they will never complain of the bargain.

LETTER XXXVIII.

CRUSTACEA--MOLLUSCA. (_Crustaceans and Mollusks._)

_Crustaceans._

Crustaceans consist of cray-fish, crabs, lobsters, and prawns, who may
be considered cousins-german of insects, among which more than one
naturalist has thought they ought to be placed. Like them they are
divided into _grinders_, having the same action of the mandibles;
and _suckers_, who are also parasites, and have tubular sheaths
containing stilettos. Mammals and birds are the victims of parasitical
insects; fishes have been reserved for the crustaceans, who do not
disdain also to fasten upon their humble neighbors, the mollusks; and
even among themselves the little ones settle down on the great. A few
live on land, but an immense majority in water, and seem destined to
represent, in the aquatic world, the aerial class of insects, from
whom, however, they differ in many ways.

The first difference is in that stony crust with which they are
enveloped, like the cockchafer in his horny cuirass, and which you
must know well enough if you have ever eaten lobster. Wherever we meet
with horn in insects, we find stone in crustaceans. The jaws are stony,
and the teeth of the stomach also. They are constructed on the same
plan, only the materials are changed.

The digestive tube is less complicated, and consists merely of one
large stomach, instead of that series of stomachs by which insects
approach the organisation of birds. On the other hand, if among some
of them the liver is reduced to simple tubes, floating loosely in the
body, as we have just seen it in the cockchafer among insects, these
tubes are generally so profusely multiplied, and press so closely
against each other, that they form a large compact lump--a true liver,
to sum up all--from which issues, as from ours, a _choledochian
canal_, a bile duct, _i. e._, which passes out into the intestine at the
entrance of the pylorus.

You recollect that canal of the liver which I was afraid to tell you
the name of because it was so ugly? Well, this is that formidable name!
Now that you have swallowed so many others, you must be strong enough
to digest this.

No chyliferous vessels have been found in crustaceans, whence one may
conclude that the chyle leaves the intestine by oozing from it, just
as it does in insects. There it gives rise to an almost transparent
sort of blood, a kind of sap, or lymph, which is put in motion by a
genuine circulation-apparatus; a real heart, with all its canals. This
heart has only one ventricle, and only sends blood in one direction,
as in the case of fishes; but there is an essential difference between
them, which we must point out. The heart of fishes may be called a
venous heart, since it only receives venous blood, which passes thence
to the gills, while that of crustaceans is an arterial heart. It
receives the blood directly it leaves the respiratory organ, and sends
it, not into one aorta, but into several arteries, which set out at
once, each in its own direction, to nourish the various quarters of
the body. This greatly resembles the system of circulation, with which
we are already acquainted. The veins only are unsatisfactory. They
form a kind of transition between the uncertain currents which convey
the blood of insects from one end to the other of the cavity in which
these strange organs lie bathed, and the closed canals of the higher
animals. But they are not canals, properly speaking. The irregular
intervals which separate the organs, more numerous here, are enclosed
by membranes, between which the venous blood pours, and naturally the
chyle also. The whole thus arrives at certain excavations formed at
the place where the legs are jointed on to the body--reservoirs, so
to speak--where the real canals come to carry it off and convey it
away into the gills.

It is, in fact, by means of gills that crustaceans breathe in their
character of aquatic animals. These gills are made nearly upon the
same model as we have already seen in those of fishes; and although
their form and arrangement differ in different species, yet the
principle is always the same: they are tufts of leaflets springing
from stems, up and down which run two tubes; one which brings the blood
from the venous reservoirs, the other which carries it to the heart.
Crabs, lobsters, and crayfish, who are the "file-leaders" of the
crustacean tribe, have gills enclosed in the body, as fishes have; but
the circulation of the water goes in a contrary direction to theirs,
as does that of the blood. Instead of entering at the mouth and going
out at the sides, as we have seen, it enters at the edge of the bony
shell which covers over the body and comes out near the mouth--a merely
accidental detail which does not in any way alter the play of the
apparatus. All these animals are equally adapted for swimming and for
walking, crabs especially, their gills accommodating themselves without
difficulty to contact with the outer air, as we have seen among certain
fishes; so that one might class them with amphibians. There is even one
crab who has acquired the name of _land-crab_, because, although he has
got gills, he dies in water, the small amount of air he can get out of
it at a time being insufficient for him, and who, therefore, lives
constantly on land. It is true that he seeks out damp spots, for his
gills would also fail him if they became parched, and, like the fishes
who make excursions on dry land, he is provided with an internal
reservoir, which is always filled with a certain quantity of water.

Some aquatic crustaceans have the labor simplified by external gills,
which hang down into the water, sometimes depending from the stomach,
sometimes from the legs. In France you sometimes see at a table certain
little animals, very like shrimps (_squillae_), the bases of whose
hinder legs are fringed by slender tufts, which are in fact their
gills. They find themselves placed there just within reach of the
venous blood; for in the body opposite the bases of the legs are little
cavities in which it accumulates. Now these gills can only act when
under water, and so the squillae dies as soon as he is removed from
that protecting element. For the same reason they cannot be kept long,
nor travel far, much to the regret of those who like them and live at
some distance from the sea.

There are other crustaceans, next-door neighbors of the squilla, whose
gills are still more simplified. Here the legs themselves are turned
into extremely thin plates, which play the part of gills, and are thus
organs for two purposes, serving at the same time to swim and breathe
with.

We have in our house one little crustacean, the only one I know of who
associates with men, and that is the wood-louse. You must know the
little grizzly beast, which rolls itself up into a ball whenever it
thinks itself in danger, and who would be taken for an insect by anyone
who was not taught otherwise. The wood-louse has neither gills hanging
down outside, nor anything inside her body which resembles the breathing
apparatus of her great relations. But, on examining her closely, you
will perceive all along her stomach a series of little plates, which
are her breathing-organs, and which come under the class of gills,
because, like other gills, they require a certain degree of moisture
to make them act properly. You will never, therefore, see a wood-louse
strutting about in the sunshine, where he would dry up far too quickly;
but if ever you get into a dark, damp corner, there you have every
chance of finding one.

Animals who breathe through their legs and through their stomachs! You
are astonished, and ask, What are we coming to? What would you say,
then, if I were to go really to the depths of the crustacean world?
We should find there such extraordinary beings as you can form no
notion of, for they all live down below in the sea, and have no special
breathing-organ at all, inasmuch as they breathe through the whole
surface of the body. Do not exclaim yet! I will soon show you one whom
you know perfectly well, and who has no other way of breathing.

But we must keep to the higher crustaceans, if we want to judge of the
class. By going too low, we run the risk of not seeing clearly. Animal
creation is here on a system of experiments: and they are so endlessly
multiplied, and exhibit such a profusion both of deceptive resemblances,
and of differences which disappear by transformations, that
classification no longer knows which way to turn. Worms, crustaceans,
mollusks; to which group do these and those belong? To which ever we
like to refer them, for these groups represent nothing definitely
determined in the plan of creation; and though easy to be distinguished
from each other in the higher branches, they become confused together
in the lower, like mountain summits which spring from a common base,
at the foot of which they are all united together.

On this account, my dear child, you will, I am sure, excuse me now and
henceforth, from entering into details of all the horrible beasts which
swarm in the shallows of the animal world, and whom learned men have
in their wonderful wisdom muffled up in terrible names, in order to
prevent children from coming near them! What would you have thought
of the poor little squilla, so prettily baptised by the fishermen, if
I had taught you that it belonged to the order of _Stomatopoda_?
You will scarcely be able to pronounce the word; but that is no fault
of mine, it is spelt so.

We will content ourselves, then, with having taken a glance at the
most clearly marked individuals; and as I said to you just now, it is
by them that we will arrange our inventory of the groups. Here, as you
may have already remarked, instead of continuing to wander from the
original model whose gradual deterioration we have been following all
this time from one class to another, it would seem that we are retracing
our steps, and regaining some portion of the lost ground. This is
because insects, as I have already stated, are an exceptional case--an
idea apart from the great general plan--a by-lane turning off from one
side of the great line of animal creation.

The crustacean, less perfectly worked out than the insect assuredly,
but more regular, forms, so to speak, the connecting line between that
tiny masterpiece of fancy, so incomplete in its exquisite organisation,
and the shapeless but better constituted lump of the mollusk, who
conceals under his heavy shell the sacred deposit of real organs, those
which we expect to find always and everywhere. An insect outside,
though less refined it is true, a mollusk within, the crustacean reminds
me of what among us is called an _amateur_--that mild lover of
the arts who holds a middle place, as it were, between the artist and
the common citizen.

I regret that you are not at present quite able to appreciate my
comparison fully: but put it by, in reserve, if possible, in your
memory; you will find out hereafter how just it is, and it will,
perhaps, help to prevent you from always setting the lively, noisy
artist, above the quiet and silent citizen. Let this, however, be
between you and me. If they could hear us talking, neither artist nor
citizen would forgive me, and the amateur still less.

_Mollusks._

There is one mollusk universally well known--namely, the oyster--so
we will choose him for discussion. To look on one's plate at that
little mass of soft, compact substance, one feels inclined to ask what
there can possibly be in common between it and us; and if you were to
declare that there was not the faintest trace of resemblance between
the organization of the oyster and our own, I should not be surprised.
Wiser people than you have been caught tripping there; not that they
were ignorant of the points in which the oyster resembled us, but they
paid no attention to them. Viewing it in other respects, they declared
that it was of a structure completely different to our own; and that,
in the construction of this machine, the Creator had worked upon a
particular plan, laid aside afterwards as useless for any other purpose.

I should like to get hold of one of those Academicians, with thirty-six
plans, and confound him before you, in proof of his relationship to
the oyster, by showing you at one sitting that there is an oyster in
himself; nay, further, that he is nothing but an oyster, revised,
amended, and considerably enlarged. And do not imagine that I am only
using a figure of speech here, as the professors of rhetoric call it;
which would be in bad taste: I am speaking literally, and to prove the
existence of the oyster in question in our Academician, I shall only
ask permission to perform a slight operation upon him. You exclaim at
this; but do not alarm yourself, for it is only an operation on paper,
he will not die from it. See now, I cut off his head, his two arms,
and his legs; I take out of his body the vertebral column and the ribs;
I gently place what remains between two shells; and ... there is my
oyster. I willingly admit that it is more carefully elaborated and
richer in details than its sisters in the oyster beds; but all the
principal organs are to be found in them also, and they positively are
beings of a similar construction: you shall judge for yourself.

The mouth--for there is a mouth, though one must look closer than the
oystermen do to discover it--the mouth is exactly what the gullet
(oesophagus) would be in a man whose head had been cut off; that is,
a truncated tube. Then comes the stomach, situated in the very midst
of the liver; which latter may easily be distinguished, even by the
most cursory glance at luncheon, from its dark color. The intestine
also goes right through the liver, doubling backwards and forwards
several times: and thus the digestive tube supplies itself with bile
from the cask (to borrow a commercial expression); and this saves the
expense of a bile-duct (choledochian canal), which would be an
unnecessary mode of conveyance in this case. The animal lives in water;
consequently, instead of lungs he has gills: [Footnote: The land-snail
has lungs.] these are those thin, finely-streaked plates which make
a fringe at the very edge of the shell. Finally, on leaving the gills
the blood is received by an arterial heart, with only one ventricle
like that of the crustaceans, in the shape of a small pear, similar
to ours, having an auricle, and an aorta, branching out so as to
distribute the blood throughout the whole body. And now what do we
find here, let me ask you, in this mutilated man, reduced to the soft
portions of the trunk, whom I have been imagining? A heart, with its
arteries; lungs; a liver; an intestine; a stomach and an oesophagus:
that is to say, merely and simply the organs of nutrition. That is
all, or very nearly so.

As you perceive, then, all the elements of our own feeding-machine lie
between the two shells of a mollusk; in a rough state as yet, it is
true; incomplete, and unruly; as in the case of the intestine, for
instance, which in many of these creatures passes without ceremony
through the heart: but even so they are quite sufficiently indicated
to prevent their being mistaken. Now this machine, it is in vain to
deny it, is the animal itself; but it lives at first, and it is this
which dies in it last. The other matter (the locomotive power),
important as it may seem to us in higher races, only holds a secondary
position in reality: the proof of which is, that here is an animal
reduced absolutely to a mere feeding-machine, who still lives, whilst
there yet remains to be found one who has nothing left but his
movement-machine, and who can yet exist. We cannot disown this primitive
animal, for we have it within ourselves; lost, so to speak, in the
midst of the accessory organs which are successively added to it in
proportion as we rise in the animal scale, but still preserving its
own life, its personality, if I may use the expression. Listen to this,
for here is a history well worth hearing.

I will explain to you, hereafter, how all the actions of the
movement-machine are performed by means of a network of nervous threads
(filaments), whose centre of impulsion is in the brain. How our will
acts upon the brain, and gives its orders to the muscles through the
nervous fibres, I will not offer to explain: it is a fact, let that
suffice us. You say to your foot, "Forward!" and off it starts; "Halt!"
and it stops. Here is an organ under command, a servant of the brain,
where we rule ourselves: with or without explanation, no one will ever
dispute this. The oyster, who has neither head nor brain, has, as his
only instrument of action, certain little masses of nervous substance
scattered right and left, which are called _ganglions_. These
communicate with each other and with the organs by nervous cords, which
are interlaced in all directions, without having any common centre,
and which give the impetus to all parts of the animal.

Well, the human oyster presents to us exactly the same nervous
organisation. It has its ganglions and its nerves to itself, which are
put into communication with the brain by some threads strayed among
his own, but which are not under its orders, and which treat with it
on equal terms. You remember, perhaps, the little republic talked about
when we first entered the digestive tube; you have now the explanation
of it. This republic is the original animal; it is the feeding-machine.
I cannot describe it, and the kingdom of which you are queen, better
than by comparing them to two States having diplomatic relations with
each other, who exchange dispatches and reciprocal influences; and as
to the importance of these respective influences, if one were to compare
them I scarcely know to which side the balance could incline.

We shall return elsewhere to this detail, one of the most interesting
of our organisation, and which here finds its natural explanation. For
the present I will content myself with reminding you that, since the
earliest days of human civilisation, all philosophers, all poets, and
all moralists, whether sacred or profane, have borne witness to that
double life within us, that inward being, blind and deaf, whose
disordered impulses so often carry trouble into those higher regions
where will and reason sit enthroned. Behold him taken in his lair at
last, this mysterious being. I have just unveiled his origin to you.
And here, dear child, I must shelter myself behind a profession of
faith. There will not be wanting people to tell you that it is degrading
man far too much to look so low for the sources of his organisation,
and that this sentence--_the human oyster_--which expresses my
idea so well, is neither more nor less than blasphemy. Let them talk,
but adopt their opinion only when they have proved to you that man had
a special Creator, and that the oyster came from a different hand from
ourselves. I should like to know with what face we could venture to
complain, poor worms that we are, because it has seemed good to our
common Father to carry forward in us his previous creations, and in
what respect human dignity would suffer from this contact with a being
who, like us, is one of the works of God. That human pride may suffer
thereby, I admit, and I am glad it should; but if God has included all
creation in His love, we may well include it all in our respect. Whence
comes our superiority at all, but from the gratuitous gifts of Him who
has made us what we are? Is it to lose it, then, to find ourselves
side by side with inferiors whom the Divine benevolence has visited
like ourselves? Surely not. But enough of the oyster, who has never,
that I am aware of, heard such strange discussions sounding in his
ears before. I have no time nor courage now to speak of the other
mollusks, who offer more or less the same system of organs which I
have just described. I must hasten on to the Worms, who give us the
last clue to the great enigma of the animal machine.

LETTER XXXIX.

VERMES--ZOOPHYTA. (_Worms and Zoophytes_).

_Worms._

The worm of worms, the one you know best, is the earthworm: so he shall
have the honor of representing his group.

He will not take much time to describe. He is, in brief, a tube, open
at both ends, so as to allow food to come in and go out. That is all.

I talked to you before about the ruminants, those food-manufacturers
who are employed in cooking victuals for the stomach, and in disengaging
albumen from the coarse materials among which it is apparently lost,
so as to give it out again in a more acceptable form. The ruminant has
other workmen under him, whom I keep in store for you as the last of
the eaters, and who prepare the raw material for him*. These are the
vegetables, who seek out the elements of albumen in earth, water, and
air, those final sources of all alimentation. The earthworm also is
a _preparer_, but in a peculiar way. Look along the garden-walks
in summer-time, after rainy weather: you will see here and there,
little heaps of earth moulded into small sticks, like dough which has
been passed through a tube. [Footnote: M. Mace's account of the
earthworm's life seems founded on the assumption that it extracts its
nourishment from the earth itself, i.e., from inorganic matter, as
_vegetables_ do, to use his own words. But this notion is so
entirely at variance with present received opinions, and also with the
fact that the animal possesses a gizzard for digesting, as well as an
intestinal canal, that it has been necessary to make considerable
alterations in the description. To dismiss his theory of the primitive
animal, etc., altogether, was, however, impossible, without omitting
the whole chapter; but as young heads are not likely to trouble
themselves about it, and it is very innocent in itself, it will do no
harm; subject to this warning, that M. Mace has taken the earthworm
for a more simply organised creature than it really is.--TR.] This is
the damp soil which the worm has passed through his tube, after
extracting from it, during its passage, the various elements of
fertility he requires for the support of his life. This is what makes
him so particularly fond of garden soil, because it is richer in animal
and vegetable matter than common earth, and proves therefore more
nourishing food. The worm, then, feeds on the fat of the earth, which
he converts into azotic aliment for the use of moles, hens and Chinese.
It only figures, it is true, for want of something better, in Chinese
cookery, so profusely hospitable for all that; but the hen doats upon
it, and you do not despise it yourself when it comes back to you in
the form of a chicken's wing, that second transformation of the matter
of which the soil of your garden is composed. It is told of certain
savage tribes, the victims of constant scarcity, that they swallow
little balls of clay in order to keep down their hunger; and during
the great famines in India the distracted inhabitants may, we are told,
be seen digging up the banks of the rivers to feed on the fertile clay
in which the splendid vegetation of their country is developed. This
is a desperate trial of that primeval system of alimentation which
answers perfectly with the worm, but becomes a cruel mockery in the
case of an organisation as exacting as that of man. Let us examine a
little more closely, then, this wonderful tube.

At first sight one notices, to begin with, that it is composed of
perfectly distinct rings, all quite alike. Inside as well as out each
of these rings is an exact repetition of the other. They are all formed
of circular muscles, enclosed between two coats, which extend from one
to the other. A series of ganglions, arranged in the form of a necklace
along the whole length of the body, set in motion the muscular system
of the rings, each of which possesses its local centre of impulsion.
Each feeds itself in its place from the nourishing juices with which
it is in contact, the interior coat enjoying the double property of
distilling digestive juices and absorbing digested ones. These juices
pass through the muscular partition, and proceed to bathe the outer
coat, which plays, at the same time, the part of coat and lung, and
affords a passage to the air through its soft, damp surface, like that
of gills. From all this results a fine red blood, such as we have not
met with since we left the reptiles, and which is manufactured in all
parts of the body at once.

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