THE CRIME OF THE LEARNED PROFESSOR MEISER.
"Ladies," said Leon, "Professor Meiser was no vulgar malefactor, but a
man devoted to science and humanity. If he killed the French colonel who
at this moment reposes beneath my coat tails, it was for the sake of
saving his life, as well as of throwing light on a question of the
deepest interest, even to each one of you.
"The duration of our existence is very much too brief. That is a fact
which no man can contradict. We know that in a hundred years, not one of
the nine or ten persons assembled in this house will be living on the
face of the earth. Is not this a deplorable fact?"
Mlle. Sambucco heaved a heavy sigh, and Leon continued:
"Alas! Mademoiselle, like you I have sighed many a time at the
contemplation of this dire necessity. You have a niece, the most
beautiful and the most adorable of all nieces, and the sight of her
charming face gladdens your heart. But you yearn for something more; you
will not be satisfied until you have seen your little grand nephews
trotting around. You will see them I earnestly believe. But will you
see their children? It is doubtful. Their grandchildren? Impossible! In
regard to the tenth, twentieth, thirtieth generation, it is useless even
to dream.
"One _will_ dream of it, nevertheless, and perhaps there is no man who
has not said to himself at least once in his life: 'If I could but come
to life again in a couple of centuries!' One would wish to return to
earth to seek news of his family; another, of his dynasty. A philosopher
is anxious to know if the ideas that he has planted will have borne
fruit; a politician, if his party will have obtained the upper hand; a
miser, if his heirs will not have dissipated the fortune he has made; a
mere land-holder, if the trees in his garden will have grown tall. No
one is indifferent to the future destinies of this world, which we
gallop through in a few years, never to return to it again. Who has not
envied the lot of Epimenides, who went to sleep in a cave, and, on
reopening his eyes, perceived that the world had grown old? Who has not
dreamed, on his own account, of the marvellous adventure of the sleeping
Beauty in the wood?
"Well, ladies, Professor Meiser, one of the least visionary men of the
age, was persuaded that science could put a living being to sleep and
wake him up again at the end of an infinite number of years--arrest all
the functions of the system, suspend life itself, protect an individual
against the action of time for a century or two, and afterwards
resuscitate him."
"He was a fool then!" cried Madame Renault.
"I wouldn't swear it. But he had his own ideas touching the main-spring
which moves a living organism. Do you remember, good mother mine, the
impression you experienced as a little girl, when some one first showed
you the inside of a watch in motion? You were satisfied that there was a
restless little animal inside the case, who worked twenty-four hours a
day at turning the hands. If the hands stopped going, you said: 'It is
because the little animal is dead.' Yet possibly he was only asleep.
"It has since been explained to you that a watch contains an assemblage
of parts well fitted to each other and kept well oiled, which, being
wound, can be considered to move spontaneously in a perfect
correspondence. If a spring become broken, if a bit of the wheel work be
injured, or if a grain of sand insinuate itself between two of the
parts, the watch stops, and the children say rightly: 'The little animal
is dead.' But suppose a sound watch, well made, right in every
particular, and stopped because the machinery would not run from lack of
oil; the little animal is not dead; nothing but a little oil is needed
to wake him up.
"Here is a first-rate chronometer, made in London. It runs fifteen days
without being wound. I gave it a turn of the key yesterday: it has,
then, thirteen days to run. If I throw it on the ground, or if I break
the main-spring, all is over. I will have killed the little animal. But
suppose that, without damaging anything, I find means to withdraw or dry
up the fine oil which now enables the parts to slip upon one another:
will the little animal be dead? No! It will be asleep. And the proof is
that I can lay my watch in a drawer, keep it there twenty-five years,
and if, after a quarter of a century, I put a drop of oil on it, the
parts will begin to move again. All that time would have passed without
waking up the little sleeping animal. It will still have thirteen days
to go, after the time when it starts again.
"All living beings, according to the opinion of Professor Meiser, are
watches, or organisms which move, breathe, nourish themselves, and
reproduce themselves as long as their organs are intact and properly
oiled. The oil of the watch is represented in the animal by an enormous
quantity of water. In man, for example, water provides about four-fifths
of the whole weight. Given--a colonel weighing a hundred and fifty
pounds, there are thirty pounds of colonel and a hundred and twenty
pounds, or about sixty quarts, of water. This is a fact proven by
numerous experiments. I say a colonel just as I would say a king; all
men are equal when submitted to analysis.
"Professor Meiser was satisfied, as are all physiologists, that to
break a colonel's head, or to make a hole in his heart, or to cut his
spinal column in two, is to kill the little animal; because the brain,
the heart, the spinal marrow are the indispensable springs, without
which the machine cannot go. But he thought too, that in removing sixty
quarts of water from a living person, one merely puts the little animal
to sleep without killing him--that a colonel carefully dried up, can
remain preserved a hundred years, and then return to life whenever any
one will replace in him the drop of oil, or rather the sixty quarts of
water, without which the human machine cannot begin moving again.
"This opinion, which may appear inadmissible to you and to me too, but
which is not absolutely rejected by our friend Doctor Martout, rests
upon a series of reliable observations which the merest tyro can verify
to-day. There _are_ animals which can be resuscitated: nothing is more
certain or better proven. Herr Meiser, like the Abbé Spallanzani and
many others, collected from the gutter of his roof some little dried
worms which were brittle as glass, and restored life to them by soaking
them in water. The capacity of thus returning to life, is not the
privilege of a single species: its existence has been satisfactorily
established in numerous and various animals. The genus Volvox--the
little worms or wormlets in vinegar, mud, spoiled paste, or grain-smut;
the Rotifera--a kind of little shell-fish protected by a carapace,
provided with a good digestive apparatus, of separate sexes, having a
nervous system with a distinct brain, having either one or two eyes,
according to the genus, a crystalline lens, and an optic nerve; the
Tardigrades--which are little spiders with six or eight legs, separate
sexes, regular digestive apparatus, a mouth, two eyes, a very well
defined nervous system, and a very well developed muscular system;--all
these die and revive ten or fifteen times consecutively, at the will of
the naturalist. One dries up a rotifer: good night to him; somebody
soaks him a little, and he wakes up to bid you good day. All depends
upon taking great care while he is dry. You understand that if any one
should merely break his head, no drop of water, nor river, nor ocean
could restore him.
"The marvellous thing is, that an animal which cannot live more than a
year, like the minute worm in grain-smut, can lie by twenty-four years
without dying, if one has taken the precaution of desiccating him.
"Needham collected a lot of them in 1743; he presented them to Martin
Folkes, who gave them to Baker, and these interesting creatures revived
in water in 1771. They enjoyed a rare satisfaction in elbowing their own
twenty-eighth generation. Wouldn't a man who should see his own
twenty-eighth generation be a happy grandfather?
"Another no less interesting fact is that desiccated animals have vastly
more tenacity of life than others. If the temperature were suddenly to
fall thirty degrees in this laboratory, we should all get inflammation
of the lungs. If it were to rise as much, there would be danger of
congestion of the brain. Well, a desiccated animal, which is not
absolutely dead, and which will revive to-morrow if I soak it, faces
with impunity, variations of ninety-five degrees and six-tenths. M.
Meiser and plenty of others have proved it.
"It remains to inquire, then, if a superior animal, a man for instance,
can be desiccated without any more disastrous consequences than a little
worm or a tardigrade. M. Meiser was convinced that it is practicable; he
wrote to that effect in all his books, although he did not demonstrate
it by experiment.
"Now where would be the harm in it, ladies? All men curious in regard to
the future, or dissatisfied with life, or out of sorts with their
contemporaries, could hold themselves in reserve for a better age, and
we should have no more suicides on account of misanthropy.
Valetudinarians, whom the ignorant science of the nineteenth century
declares incurable, needn't blow their brains out any more; they can
have themselves dried up and wait peaceably in a box until Medicine
shall have found a remedy for their disorders. Rejected lovers need no
longer throw themselves into the river; they can put themselves under
the receiver of an air pump, and make their appearance thirty years
later, young, handsome and triumphant, satirizing the age of their cruel
charmers, and paying them back scorn for scorn. Governments will give
up the unnatural and barbarous custom of guillotining dangerous people.
They will no longer shut them up in cramped cells at Mazas to complete
their brutishness; they will not send them to the Toulon school to
finish their criminal education; they will merely dry them up in
batches--one for ten years, another for forty, according to the gravity
of their deserts. A simple store-house will replace the prisons, police
lock-ups and jails. There will be no more escapes to fear, no more
prisoners to feed. An enormous quantity of dried beans and mouldy
potatoes will be saved for the consumption of the country.
"You have, ladies, a feeble delineation of the benefits which Doctor
Meiser hoped to pour upon Europe by introducing the desiccation of man.
He made his great experiment in 1813 on a French colonel--a prisoner, I
have been told, and condemned as a spy by court-martial. Unhappily he
did not succeed; for I bought the colonel and his box for the price of
an ordinary cavalry horse, in the dirtiest shop in Berlin."