Page:Once a Week Volume V.djvu/589

 582 size, and we find the fact to be so; for whilst the Irish peasantry depended almost entirely upon this food, their stomachs were so unnaturally large, as to render them the most pot-bellied nation in Europe. If we were to ask what meal supplies in the smallest compass the two great sustainers of life, carbonaceous and nitrogenous food, we should point to the labourer’s bonne-bouche, a dish of bacon and beans; thus we see that the instincts of man lead him to the very same results as the most careful chemical experiments do the philosopher in his laboratory. We may, as a general rule, depend upon our taste as a faithful guide to our alimentary requirements; it is not a rule of life, as some sour dietetic Solons would have it, that “whatever is nice is wrong,” and when the child clamours for lumps of sugar, be sure that it is wiser in its generation than you, good mother, for denying it; for sugar supplies, in the most digestible form, the heat-producing food so necessary for its preservation. But it may be asked, why, when we wish to show the amount of food necessary to supply the daily waste of the organic matter in the body, we refer to vegetable products. The chief reason is, that meat to the poor man is a luxury rather than a customary article of diet; and another that all the elements of animal food are to be found in the vegetable world. To use Professor Playfair’s words: “The nutritive, or flesh-forming parts of food are called fibrine, albumen, and casein: they contain the four elements, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen, in exactly the same proportions, and are found both in vegetable and animal food. Fibrine may be got either by stirring fresh drawn blood, or from the juice of a cauliflower; albumen or white of egg, from eggs, from cabbage-juice, or from flour; casein, or cheese, exists more abundantly in peas and beans, than it does in milk itself. Vegetables are the true makers of flesh; animals only arrange the flesh which they find ready formed in animals.” If we go further down in the chain, we find all food in the débris of the rocks, for the breaking up of these form the earth, from which it is eliminated by the chemistry of plants, to be further sorted for man’s use in the bodies of animals. We thus see how significant and literally true is the term we apply to the earth of “our great Mother.”

The directors of this department, having analysed nearly every article of food which ministers to the wants of man, sum up by reducing man himself to his elements. The spectator at the end of the long gallery is suddenly brought up by a large glass case, thus ticketed: “Ultimate elements in a human body weighing 154 lbs.” Everybody is curious to look at his own contents, and consequently the glass case is generally crowded, and we fancy many an old-fashioned person is inclined to doubt that his corpus can be converted into such a “doctor’s shop” as he here sees solemnly ranged in bottles of all sizes. Can it be possible that that tank, containing sufficient water for a good sized Vivarium, represents the amount of that element in an average man perfectly free from the dropsy? When we are told that a human being of the mean size contains 11 lbs. of pure liquid fluid, we can understand why there are so many thirsty souls in the world. Then we see his fat in a bottle, looking like so much bear’s grease, and find there is 15 lbs. weight of it. His 15 lbs. of gelatine looks painfully like the glue of commerce. Still more monstrous does it seem, to think that his too solid flesh is reducible into the phosphates of lime, carbonates of lime, and the various sulphates of iron, magnesium, potassium, sodium, silicum, and fluorine which we see paraded before us with such hard, dry, chemical cruelty. But what are those large white blocks meant to represent? These are the measures of our gases. Thus we are told that a block one foot square represents the amount of oxygen in our economy, but that our hydrogen would occupy 3000 such blocks! Good gracious! enough to build a pyramid, to say nothing of the chlorine and nitrogen. We enter this department with feelings of curiosity, but leave it with wonder, and a sense of the reductio ad absurdum to which our chemists have reduced imperial man himself.

A. W.

Some dozen years ago, before the railways now throbbing like arteries through the land were in existence, I went with two friends to lodge in Cornwall. The place was the most retired I ever saw. Far removed from the cross-country road, and only reached by venturing over a track—for it could not even be called a path—winding along the edges of cliffs often two or three hundred feet above the beach, it was a place to delight all whose good fortune had carried them within sight of it.

The house we occupied had only its situation to recommend it. Fixed down at the seaward end of the valley, it looked like a child’s toy among those magnificent hills. We could look from our beds of a morning to the ridge of hill high above us, and nothing more splendid ever greeted human eye than when the rising sun seemed to rest a moment—a world of light—on that emerald hill-top. The valley extended about three miles. The hills on either side were broken and varied in form and colour; some rose with sharp outline against the clear sky, and when the day was young showed a gorgeous covering of gorse and heather; others were clothed with dark green coppice-wood, while trees of ash, elm, and oak waved their graceful boughs on the less densely covered hills. Here and there the hand of the husbandman had displaced the original growth, and fields of golden corn and gay clover loaded the air with perfume. All through that valley, one behind another the hills, that seemed to elbow each other for room, shut it in from the rest of the world so completely that the sky-roof above and the merry mill-stream babbling through it made up a perfect picture.

To see that valley in May, when the apple-trees round the homely thatched cottages were in bloom, carried one back to the Arcadian dreams of the poets. Then the birds sang all day long. Rarely were the echoes woke by other voices than