Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/820

800 ways been accustomed to dine daily from their childhood upward, they felt hungry at the habitual dinner-hour, and they sat down to their five courses with an unquestioning acceptance of the necessity for feeding to prevent starvation. But when I inquired why people who did not eat should starve, why they should not imitate the thrifty anaconda, and take one meal in a twelvemonth instead of three in a day, they appeared to regard my question as rather silly, and as certainly superfluous. Yet I must confess the query seems to me both pertinent and sensible; and it may be worth while to attempt some answer here in such language as can be understanded of the people, without diving into those profound mysteries of formulæ and equations with which physicists love to becloud the subjects of their investigation.

A still more startling case than that of the anaconda will help to throw a little light upon the difficult problem which we have to solve. An Egyptian desert-snail was received at the British Museum on March 25, 1846. The animal was not known to be alive, as it had withdrawn into its shell, and the specimen was accordingly gummed, mouth downward, on to a tablet, duly labeled and dated, and left to its fate. Instead of starving, this contented gasteropod simply went to sleep in a quiet way, and never woke up again for four years. The tablet was then placed in tepid water, and the shell loosened, when the dormant snail suddenly resuscitated himself, began walking about the basin, and finally sat for his portrait, which may be seen of life-size in Mr. Woodward's "Manual of the Mollusca." Now, during those four years the snail had never eaten a mouthful of any food, yet he was quite as well and flourishing at the end of the period as he had been at its beginning.

Hence we are led to the inquiry—What is the actual function which food subserves in the human body? Why is it true that we must eat or we must die, while the snake and the snail can fast for months or years together with impunity? How do we differ from these lower animals in such a remarkable degree, when all the operations of our bodies so closely resemble theirs in general principle?

Everybody has heard it said that food is to men and animals what fuel is to a steam-engine. Everybody accepts this statement in a vague sort of way, but until the last few years nobody has been able really to explain what was the common feature of the two cases. For example, most people if asked would answer that the use of food is to warm the body, but this is really quite beside the question: because, in the first place, the use of fuel is not to warm the steam-engine, but to keep up its motion; and, in the second place, many animals are scarcely perceptibly warmer than the medium in which they live. Again, most people show in every-day conversation that they consider the main object of food to be the replacement of the materials of the body; whereas we shall see hereafter that its real object is the replacement of the energies which have been dissipated in working. Indeed, there is no more reason why the materials of an animal body should waste away