I venture to hope, my dear child, that more and more light is dawning
upon your mind, as we gradually proceed on our little journey. You
must by this time have some idea how the food, which has been masticated
and softened in the mouth, cooked, kneaded, and decomposed in the
stomach, and transformed into a soft, semi-transparent kind of paste,
will soon be ready to mix with the blood, in order to repair the waste
that the life-stream is continually undergoing in its ceaseless course
through all parts of the body.
You have perhaps thought it a sad degradation for a truffle-stuffed
fowl to turn to _chyme._ But when you consider that by this means
it becomes part and parcel of a human body, the change is not to be
despised. It was necessary, to begin with, that materials destined to
the honor of being incorporated into our frame, should break the links
which bound them to the condition of fowl and vegetable, and thus be
free to engage in new relations; just as a man who wishes to be
naturalized in a new country must first break the ties which hold him
to the old one. Those articles of food we were speaking of lately,
which are so stiff and ceremonious, and want so much coaxing before
they change into _chyme,_ which, moreover, we call _indigestible_
because they tire the stomach so much more than the rest, are merely
those whose component parts being held together by more solid ties than
usual, continue obstinately in the same state as at first, and will not
consent to that dissolution which is the first condition of their
glorious transformation.
Moreover, the transformation which has been described to you now, you
will henceforth meet with everywhere; wherever, that is to say, and
as far as, you choose to pursue the study of nature. God works by one
grand and simple rule so far as we can discover. He destroys to
reconstruct, builds up what is to be, out of the ruins of what has
been, creates life by death, if I may so express myself, and thus,
what takes place in our stomachs on a small scale goes on on a large
one in the universe.
Social communities, like everything else, are subject to this universal
law, and it is not always an advantage to them when they refuse to be
digested in the great stomach of the age!
While we are on this subject, and to show you how wonderfully this
little history of eating, told in this familiar style, applies right
and left, let us reflect on the causes which have produced a great and
mighty nation in one country (as in France), while in another (as in.
Germany), a far more numerous and even more intellectual population
has failed to rise to anything like the same distinction. The
explanation is not difficult. In the one case, the petty tribes among
which the land was originally divided consented to mix, and dissolve,
and be digested as it were together, in order to revive again for a
more glorious career; while in the other, the aboriginal societies
have adhered stiffly to their distinctive characters, and failing to
submit to the regenerating process, cling together in indigested
portions, rather than assimilate into one great whole.
However, we must return to the _pylorus_ or we shall be getting
into a difficulty! What I am now going to offer you though, is rather
hard of digestion, but it will not do to provide sweet pastry only for
your brain; it will be more wholesome for it to have something a little
more solid to bite at from time to time.
The _pylorus_, then, as has been shown, makes way for all sorts
of aliments when they have been converted into _chyme; i.e._,
when they have lost their original form and individuality. They are
dead to their first life, therefore; now the question is, how are they
to be revived into the new one?
Behind the _pylorus_ extends a long conduit or tube--so long as to be
sometimes seven times the length of the whole body, but doubled up
backwards and forwards a number of times, so as to form a large bundle,
which fills the whole cavity of the belly--or as we also call it, the
_abdomen_. This bundle or packet is known to everybody as _the
intestines_, and it is divided into two portions: the _small
intestine_--that is, the slenderer, finer portion which begins at the
_pylorus_, and forms all the doublings of the packet, and the _large
intestine_, which is shorter and thicker also, as its name implies, and
keeps to some extent separate, though it is in reality only a
continuation of the other. This starts at the base of the _abdomen_,
near the right side, goes up in a straight line to the height of the
stomach, below which it passes, making a large bend in front of the
small intestine; after which it descends on the left side to the lower
part of the trunk, where it terminates.
You will perhaps inquire how the _chyme_ continues to make its way
through all these manifold twists of the intestines; but do not trouble
yourself; it has only to let itself go. That _vermicular movement_ which
we noticed in the _oesophagus_ and in the _stomach_ is found here also.
It reigns, so to speak, from one end of our internal eating-machine to
the other; which eating-machine, by the way, we will now call by its
proper scientific name--_the intestinal canal_; and it is by that
movement the food is carried forward from the first moment it leaves the
mouth, and helped through all its journeyings, till it reaches the
termination of the large intestine.
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. It is a workshop in
constant operation, providing night and day for your necessities; and
in this respect the inner man sets a first-rate example to the outer
one! You will recollect what I said to you the other day about the
internal republic, and the provinces which are under your sole
government. It would be very disgraceful for the kingdom to be doing
nothing while the republic is working so hard; and a queen who
understands her office will make it a point of honor to banish idleness
from her household; in the houses of her neighbors this word is unknown.
The _chyme_ once launched into this moving tube, is in no danger
of remaining stationary there; the fear is, of its passing on too
quickly, as you will soon see. But this danger has been provided
against. Along the whole course of its journey, though chiefly at the
commencement, it encounters at intervals certain elastic fleshy valves
which interrupt its progress, and do not allow it to pass till it has
accumulated in sufficient force to push them before it, and so escape.
In consequence of which it is always being checked in its advance; and
during these stoppages a most important work goes on upon it at leisure.
You must understand first, that the substances of which our food is
composed, and which are afterwards decomposed in the stomach, are not
all invited to enter the blood. Our aliments are something like the
stones which the gold-seekers of California reduce to powder in order
to extract therefrom the hidden particles of gold they contain. The
gold of our food is that portion of it which the blood is able to
appropriate to his own advantage; the rest he rejects as refuse. And
this explains why a small slice of meat nourishes you more than a whole
plateful of salad. Meat is a stone absolutely full of gold, while the
salad has only a few veins of it here and there, and by far the greater
part of the material it sends to the intestines, has, in consequence,
to be thrown away.
Now it is in the first portion of the small intestine, the part known
by the Latin name _duodenum,_ which signifies twelve (because it
is about the length of twelve finger-breadths), that the division takes
place between the parts which go to nourish the blood, and those which
are useless refuse. It is an important operation as you may suppose,
and were the _chyme_ to pass rapidly through the small intestine
the gold would run the risk of being carried off with the refuse.
After the delay in the stomach, the food-substances make another halt
in the _duodenum,_ which, being very thin and slender, would have
great difficulty in containing them at the time of their grand entry,
an hour or two after a meal, were it not that it possesses the property
of expanding itself to such an extent, that it swells out on grand
occasions to the usual size of the stomach itself, so that it has
sometimes been considered as a second stomach. And no doubt the
operation which takes place in it gives it a claim to the appellation,
for thereby the finishing stroke is put to the work previously begun
in the stomach, and one may fairly say that, but for this last touch,
very little would be accomplished at all.
Above the _duodenum_, and hid behind the stomach, is a kind of sponge,
similar in nature to those we have already observed in the mouth. To
this has been given the somewhat ridiculous name of _pancreas_; I call
it ridiculous because it is derived from two Greek words which signify
_all flesh_; whereas the _pancreas_, which is a sponge of the same
description as the salivary glands, presents the appearance of a grayish
granulous mass which is not fleshy at all. Whatever be its name,
however, our sponge communicates with the _duodenum_ through a small
tube, by means of which it pours into the _chyme_, as it accumulates, a
copious supply of a fluid exactly like the _saliva_ of the mouth.
Just by the place where the tube from the _pancreas_ empties itself into
the _duodenum_, another tube arrives bringing also a fluid, but of a
different sort. This last comes from the liver, where there is a
manufactory of _bile_--an unpleasant yellowish-green liquid, the name of
which you have no doubt heard before, and which plays a very important
part in the transformation of the aliments.
These new agents, the bile and the liver, are far too important to be
passed over in a few words; I reserve them, therefore, for my next
letter. Meantime, not to leave you longer in suspense, I may say that
the separation between the gold and the refuse in the _chyme_ takes
place as soon as the latter has received the two liquids furnished
by the liver and the _pancreas_. If you ask in what manner the
division is accomplished, I confess, to my shame, that I am not able
to explain it! What takes place there is a chemical process, and
hereafter I shall have occasion to explain the meaning of that phrase.
But the Great Chemist has not in this instance seen fit to divulge to
man the secret of the work.
Indeed, you must prepare yourself beforehand, my dear child, to meet
with many other mysteries besides this, if we pursue to the end our
study of this flesh and bone which constitute the body of man. And
here I recall what Camille Desmoulins is reported to have said about
St. Just, viz., that he carried his head as high as if it were a
consecrated Host.
[Footnote: The young Protestant reader who has never lived
in a Catholic country, will perhaps need to be told, that what
is here called Consecrated Host, is the sacramental wafer, or communion
bread of the church. In French called _hostie_, in Italian, _ostia_.
In all their religious processions, which are very frequent, the host
is carried by the priest highest in authority, in a glass box placed
on a staff about four feet long, which he holds before him and so far
elevated that he has to look up to it. Over his head a richly
embroidered canopy of satin is always carried by several men; and while
these are passing, all good Catholics uncover the head and bend the
knee, wherever they may be.
It is the custom also for the priest to be called to administer the
sacrament to any one about to die, on which occasion he always walks
under this canopy, dressed in his priestly robes, carrying the host
and preceded by some boys, ringing a bell, when the same ceremony is
observed. In passing a regiment or company of soldiers, the column is
halted, wheeled into line, and with arms presented, the whole line,
officers and men, kneel before it, and the priest usually turns and
offers a benediction. When he goes in the evening to the house of the
dying, it is customary for the people to go out upon the balconies
with lighted lamps and kneel while the host is being carried by.]
You will read about these two men by-and-by in history. Meantime I
will not bid you do exactly the same as St. Just, because you would be
laughed at; but in one point of view he was not altogether wrong. The
human body is, in very truth, a temple in which the Deity maybe said
to reside, not inactively, not veiling his presence, but living and
moving unceasingly, watching on our behalf over the mysterious
accomplishment of the everlasting laws which equally guide the
_chyme_ in its workings through our frames, and direct the sun
in its course through the heavens. We mortals eat, but it is God who
brings nourishment out of our food.