Jean Macé

“ 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. ”

“ If your body were made of glass, so that you could look through it to watch the intestine at work, it would appear to you like an enormous worm coiled up into a bundle, heaving and moving with all its rings at once. You never suspected there was such a movement within you; yet it has been going on there continually ever since you were born, and will not cease till you die. Your internal machinery never goes to sleep, not even when you are sleeping yourself. ”

“ You must know that the chameleon is a lumbering lazy animal, who feeds on flies and other swift insects, and who would, therefore, be constantly liable to go without his dinner but that his tongue serves him for a hunting weapon, like those of the wood-pecker and the ant-eater. When at rest, it is an oval spongy mass, lying comfortably in the mouth, with nothing formidable in its appearance; but let the prey come frisking round the chameleon, as if despising so helpless an enemy, and this great soft tongue is transformed into an active dart. ”

“ Thus the hand is the tool which we make use of to lay hold of anything—so an organ; the eye is the instrument of sight—so an organ; the heart is the machine which causes the blood to circulate—so an organ; the liver fabricates the bile—it is an organ therefore; the bones are the framework which support the weight of the body—so organs; the muscles are the power which sets the bones in movement—organs also, therefore; the skin is the armor which protects them—so an organ: in fact everything within us is an organ. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ This invasion of the palate by teeth, which began in the lizard and the serpent, assumes alarming proportions here. It is not merely the roof of the palate which is spiked with teeth: above, below, at the sides, everywhere to the very limits of the oesophagus, the little fangs triumphantly stick out their slender points. It is impossible, therefore, to state their number. Nature has scattered them broadcast without counting, just as she has done with the hairs of the beard round the human mouth; and the comparison is not so impertinent as you may think. ”

“ All the animals we have considered hitherto have warm blood, and bear within themselves the source of their heat, which is pretty nearly always the same. But reptiles are cold-blooded, and heat comes to them chiefly from without.
If, at the end of a cold winter, we go to some favorable corner to catch the first rays of spring sunshine, we feel ourselves almost re-born, as it were, as if a new life had come into us with the sunbeams. Look at the little lizard you see frisking on the white stones of the wall; upon him decidedly the sun is darting actual life from its rays. ”

“ Thus, the steward gives tiles to the slater, planks to the carpenter, colors to the painter, lime and bricks to the mason—the very same lime that we have in our teeth—in fact, he has got everything that can be wanted in his storehouse, and it is to him that every one applies in time of need.
Now our body also is a mansion, and has its steward too. But what a steward—how active! what a universal genius I how inefficient by comparison are the stewards of the greatest lords! He goes, he comes, he is everywhere at once ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The vampire bat, which roams by night like other bats, goes straight at the large animals it sees asleep, delicately opens a vein in the throat without waking them, and sucks their blood in long draughts, taking care, by fanning them with its wings, to lull them into a cool and balmy slumber. It does not, as you see, make a savage attack on its victim: it merely inflicts a bite like that of the leech, but the result may be death. ”

“ Imagine a thick soft lump absolutely crammed with fat, and completely immovable, because it is glued down along its whole length to the bottom of the mouth, and you will have a good idea of this strange tongue, which in the whale, the largest of the cetaceans, attains to the length of twenty-five feet and the width of twelve, and of itself alone furnishes the whale-fishers with from five to six tons of oil. This is a great deal farther from us than even the long string which serves as a tongue to the ant-eater; and you feel at once that we are getting among strangers. ”

“ We will study first, piece by piece, the exquisite machine within ourselves, which is of such unceasing use to us as long as we do not give it more than a proper share of work to perform. Do you understand? We will see what becomes of the mouthful of bread which you place so coolly between your teeth, as if when that was done nothing further remained to be thought about. We will trace it in its passage through every part of the machine, from beginning to end. ”

“ You saw, some time ago, what an amount of muscular exertion was required for running—what a violent flow of blood, what hurried play of the lungs. Now in flying it is still worse; for the earth, at any rate, holds us up quite naturally, whereas the air will not hold up the bird unless it is beaten vigorously and unremittingly by an untiring wing. If we men, constructed as we are, had to do such work, we should be out of breath at once; the heart would cry out immediately for quarter, and the diaphragm turn red with anger. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And then, in the mysterious depths of vegetable existence is organized that wonderful quadrille of the aliments of nutrition, the history of which has now been sufficiently explained to you.
The vegetable kingdom, therefore, is simply the great kitchen in which the dinner of the animal kingdom is being constantly made ready; and when we eat beef, it is, in fact, the grass which the ox has eaten, which nourishes us. The animal is only a medium which transmits intact to us the albumen extracted in his own stomach from the juices furnished to him in the fields. ”

“ When people remain too long without eating, they have, as they say, twinges in the stomach. This is because the stomach, becoming by degrees quite empty, and contracting more and more, the surrounding parts which were sustained by it, lose their support, and strain at their ligaments, which now have all the weight to bear. Careless people, who do not think of such things, are reminded by the twinging pains that it is time to eat, just as a careless servant is called to order by the bell of which his master has pulled the string. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The artery of the wrist is in fact a small heart, not only because it follows all the movements of the large one, but because it carries forward the work which the other begins, and assists also in propelling the blood to the furthest extremities of the limbs, driving it on in its turn at each of its own contractions. Imagine a fire-engine, whose pipes should take up and drive forwards along their whole length the water which is thrown upon the fire, and you will have some idea of the marvellous machine which is at work in our behalf within us. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ Have you ever observed a worm or a leech in motion? You see a successive swelling up of the whole surface of its body, as the creature gradually pushes forward, just as if there was something in its inside rolling along from the tail to the head. Such is precisely the appearance which the oesophagus would present to you, as the food passes down it, if you had the opportunity of seeing it in action; and this has been called the vermicular movement, in consequence of its resemblance to the movement of a worm. ”

“ I should be a good deal puzzled to say what nitrogen does in the air: he is there as an inert body, and leaves all the business to the oxygen. When we breathe, for instance, the nitrogen enters our lungs together with its inseparable companion, but it goes out as it went in, without leaving a trace of its passage. Nevertheless, as sometimes happens among men, the one who does nothing takes up the most room. Nitrogen alone occupies four-fifths of the atmosphere, where it is of no other use than to moderate the ardent activity of king oxygen, who would consume everything were he alone. ”

“ Fire is not a present once made to man, but liable to be taken away from him at will. It is a law of nature which existed before the human race came into being, and which will doubtless continue to exist when the human race shall have disappeared. The existence of fire is connected in the most intimate way with that of that great king of the world of whom we spoke last time—Oxygen. Fire is the wedding-feast of Oxygen with other substances! ”

“ But the commotion is no laughing matter, I assure you; for if one had swallowed a little too far the wrong way, or if the substance swallowed had been too heavy for the air-tube, aided by the lungs, to eject within a certain time, death would have ensued: instances of which are by no means unknown. Nature does nothing in vain; this is no case of a man frightened by a mouse. When you find your whole being concentrating its efforts to one point, and betraying such distress, at an accident apparently so trifling, you may be sure there is danger, and real danger too ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”