THE STOMACH--_(continued)_.
We made a very long story of the stomach last time, my dear child;
and, after all, I see that there was one thing I forgot to tell
you--viz., what it is like.
Have you ever seen a bagpiper, I wonder? A man who carries under his
arm a kind of large dark brown bag, which he fills with air by blowing
into it, and out of which he presently forces the same air into a
musical pipe by pressing it gently with his elbow. If you never saw
such a thing, it is a pity; first, because the bagpipe was the national
instrument of our ancestors the Gauls, and is religiously preserved
as such by the Scotch Highlanders and the peasants of Brittany--(two
remnants of that illustrious race, whose history I recommend to your
careful perusal some day); secondly, and it is this fact which has the
greatest interest for us just now, because that large bag, which is
the principal part of the instrument, gives you a very exact idea of
your stomach; for in fact it really and truly _is_ a stomach itself, and
moreover, the stomach of an animal whose interior formation resembles
yours very, very much.
And who do you suppose is this audacious animal, which presumes to
have an inside so like that of a pretty little girl? Really, I am half
ashamed to name him, for fear you should be angry with me for doing
so. It is--it is the pig! The resemblance is not exactly a flattering
one to you, perhaps, but we are all alike, and it would be worse than
foolish to grumble at being created as we are. Moreover, there is one
difference; the pig, who thinks of nothing but eating, has a very much
larger stomach than we have, which is some consolation, at any rate.
Place the palm of your right hand on what is called the pit of the
stomach, turning the ends of the fingers towards the heart; your hand
will nearly cover the space usually occupied by the stomach, and you
may figure it to yourself as a rounded and elongated bag, bigger above
than below, making a very decided bend inside as it descends from the
heart downward; something like one of those long French pears, called
"Bon-chretiens," if it were bent in the middle, and the big end of it
were placed next the heart. As for the exact size of the bag, there
is no telling it, for it depends upon circumstances. It is a very
convenient bag in that respect; just such a one as you would like to
have in your frock for a pocket; only there would be a danger of your
being tempted to put too many things into it. For as you fill it, it
expands, and enlarges itself like an indian-rubber ball, which, though
only the size of an egg to begin with, becomes as big as your head if
you blow hard into it. Then, as it gets empty, it recovers itself,
diminishing gradually in size in plait-like contractions.
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.
In your case, my dear child, such warnings are soon attended to, and
you have not always even to wait till they come. But there are hundreds
of miserable beings who are warned to no purpose, who cannot obey the
master when he calls for his rations, because they have nothing to
give him; and when this forced disobedience lasts too long, they end
by dying of it. In cases like these, when human beings thus cruelly
perish, the stomach is found to be contracted till it is scarcely
bigger than one's finger.
On the other hand, a man once died suffocated from excess of food,
after one of those great public dinners, which last four, six, or more
hours--one can scarcely say correctly how long--and the doctors who
examined him found his stomach so prodigiously enlarged that it alone
occupied more than one-half of his inside. As you perceive, therefore,
the stomach has, properly speaking, no fixed size. Its size depends
upon what there is in it. It is like those men whose manners go up and
down with their fortunes; who seem very grand people when their pockets
are well filled, but become very small ones when their purses are
empty. There is, nevertheless, this difference between them, that such
men are fools, because they are men, and not _bags_; whereas the
stomach is a sensible bag, fulfilling with intelligence the duties of
its character as a bag. It is very fortunate for us that it is ready
to change its size, according to the caprices of our appetite; and
dressmakers would do well if they could get a hint from it how to
improve their style of pockets, which certainly cannot have cost their
inventors any very great effort of imagination!
The way in which this extraordinary pocket empties itself is not less
curious than the rest. As long as digestion is going on, the stomach
is firmly closed at each end; at the upper one by the last ring of the
_aesophagus_, and at the lower by another ring of the same kind,
only stronger; the watchful guardian of the passage which leads to the
intestines. This ring is called the _pylorus_.
For once, here is a name which agrees with our method of describing
the human machine, and I have much pleasure in translating it to you,
although it is a Greek word. _Pylorus_ is the Greek for a porter;
and our ring is indeed a porter like the one of which we have already
said so much, and which I called last time the _porter up above_,
in anticipation of his colleague below.
The porter up above presides at the entrance; the one below at the
exit, and both for the same purpose, namely, to _taste._ [Footnote:
It would be absurd to say so in the common acceptation of the term;
but according to No. 1 of Mr. Mayo's "Classification of the impressions
produced by substances taken into the fauces," viz., _"Where
sensations of_ touch _alone are produced, as by rock-crystal,
sapphire, or ice,"_ the word taste may be applied to the
discriminating faculty of the _Pylorus_.--TR.]
It may well astonish you, that you should have in your inside a taster
who is not accountable to you; who experiences sensations of which you
know nothing, and cannot even form an idea. Yet thus it is. The
_pylorus_ actually tastes the paste which is in the stomach, and
if it is not to his taste, that is to say, if the work of digestion
has not sufficiently transformed it for use, he keeps the door
relentlessly closed.
The porter up above has a thousand different tastes. He makes his bow
to meringues, and admits wings of chickens. Fries, roasts, stews,
things tender or crisp, sweet and salt, oily, greasy, or sour; amongall
kinds he has friends whom he welcomes in succession; and it is
well for us that he does so, for we share in all his pleasures.
The porter below, who works for himself alone, obscure and unknown
down in his black hole, the porter below, I say, has but one taste,
knows but one friend--a gray-looking paste, semi-liquid, with a very
peculiar unsavoury smell, disagreeable enough to any one but himself,
which is called the _chyme_, I scarcely know why, but it is what
everything one eats turns into, without exception, be it delicate or
coarse by nature. The great lord's truffle-stuffed pullet makes, as
nearly as possible, the same _chyme_ as the charcoal-burner's black
bread; and though the palate of the former may be better treated
than that of the latter, the _pylori_ can enjoy but one and the
selfsame sauce. Equality is soon restored in this case, therefore, as
you see.
To be free to pass through then, the contents of the stomach must be
reduced to the condition of _chyme,_ the only substance which finds
favor with the _pylorus:_ and as, in the endless varieties of food which
go to form our nutriment, some sorts turn into _chyme_ much more quickly
than others, it follows, that by the aid of its discriminating tact
(which is not easy to elude) the _pylorus_ allows some to pass, while it
turns back others, until all in succession are converted into chyme. For
example, in the case of a mouthful of bread and meat swallowed at once,
the bread passes away on its travels long before the meat has done
dancing attendance in the stomach, awaiting that transformation without
which the _pylorus_ will never allow it to slip through.
This ought to make you seriously reflect on the danger of carelessly
swallowing things, which, by their nature, are not susceptible of being
converted into _chyme,_ particularly if they are too large to
hide in the general paste, as a cherry-stone will sometimes do, so
mixed up with other food as to pass unperceived by the _pylorus,_
over whose decisions we have no control, remember. It bangs the door
to, be assured, in the very face of anything obnoxious without
hesitation, and the poor stomach would find itself condemned to retain
them for an indefinite period, unless by dint of prayers and
supplications they should contrive to soften the stern guardian, who
may at last get accustomed to their approach, and, perhaps, in a weak
moment, allow them to pass as contraband goods; like a custom-house
officer on a foreign frontier who will occasionally shut his eyes to
a country friend's packet of tobacco. But the poor stomach has had to
suffer a martyrdom meantime, while the dispute was pending, and before
the intruder has been winked at by the porter.
I shall remember all my life the history of a peach-stone, which was
related to me in 1831. I was at the time a youngster at the Stanislaus
College, and (aided perhaps by the Revolution of July, which had
recently occurred), it was just then discovered to be a proper thing
to set about teaching the laws of nature to children. Consequently,
for the first time in the history of schools, a professor of natural
history was added to the instructors of Latin and Greek. I leave you
to judge how we opened our ears to his lessons. When we arrived in the
course of our new studies at the _pylorus,_ of which we had none
of us ever heard before, our professor, in warning us, as I have done
you, of the dangers of imprudent gluttony, related, as an instance,
the case of a lady who had inadvertently swallowed a peach-stone. For
two years she suffered agonies in her stomach without any cessation
or relief. The luckless peach-stone, repelled by the walls of the
stomach, which its very touch irritated, was incessantly thrown against
the entrance of the _pylorus,_ but in vain. As to turning itself
into _chyme,_ such a thing was not to be thought of, it was far
too hard a substance for that. Round and round it went, causing in its
relentless course such renewed suffering to the poor patient, that she
was visibly sinking from day to day.
The doctors, finding all their treatment of no avail, began to despair
of her life, when one fine day she was suddenly, and as if by
enchantment, relieved of her tormentor. The peach-stone had bribed the
porter, with whom, in the course of the two years, it had scraped up
a sort of friendship. It had cleared the terrible barrier, had been
allowed to slip out, and the lady was saved; but it was only just in
time.
I do not know, my dear, that this story, which is certainly well
calculated to cure you of any fancy for swallowing peach-stones,
willmake as much impression on you as it did on me five-and-twenty years
ago. The idea of telling it to you occurred to me quite by chance. It
has carried me back to the time when, as is now the case with you, the
mysteries which lie hidden in our internal organization were beginning
to be revealed to my mind; and you will one day know with what delight
one recalls the remembrance of these first dawnings of the intellectual
life--that delightful infancy of the growing mind--more rich in
recollections, and more interesting a thousand fold than the infancy
of the body. I have allowed myself the little treat of this episode,
and if I have had the good fortune to amuse you at all during our
progress, you must not cavil at this piece of self-indulgence.
And now we have done just what the peach-stone did; we, too, have
passed the barrier, and are out of the stomach, but still we have not
yet come to the end of our tale.