Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/828

808, though it must be sufficient on the whole to balance waste. We must not regard the object of food, however, as being merely to build up the matter of the body; we must rather consider it as intended to recruit the energies of the body. The more active any creature is, both in its automatic and its voluntary movements, the greater will be the amount of hydrocarbons consumed or used up in its muscles, and the greater, consequently, the amount of food and oxygen which it will require to make up the loss. The tiny humming-bird will need far more food in a year than the great anaconda with which we began our discourse: because the humming-bird has a rapidly moving heart and lungs, while the cold-blooded snake respires and circulates slowly; and the humming-bird darts about perpetually at lightning-speed from flower to flower, while the snake lies coiled up motionless in its blanket from year's end to year's end, or only comes out sleepily now and then to swallow the food which will keep up its vital actions through another long and lazy fast.

The desert-snail, however, can endure much longer without food than even the anaconda, because, like so many other mollusca, it can hibernate. This process of hibernation consists in the inducement of a state during which the heart ceases to beat, respiration is suspended, and the animal can hardly be said to live at all. But when warmth and moisture are once more applied, the heart recommences its action, the lungs or gills quicken their movements, voluntary locomotion ensues, and the creature sets out again on the quest for food. Something analogous occurs in the case of the bear, the dormouse, and other hibernating quadrupeds; but in these instances the vital functions continue much more in their ordinary state, and are kept up by the supply of fat which is dissolved by the blood, and consumed in effecting the necessary automatic actions. The bear, which goes to sleep in the autumn as sleek and plump as a prize pig, wakes up in the spring a poor, lean wretch, with only just flesh enough to cover his bones, and carry him off in search of fresh food. The much more complicated mechanism of the higher animals requires to be kept always in action; it can not cease almost entirely, like that of the snail, and then revive again when circumstances become more favorable. Hence hibernating mammals must lay by fat during the summer to keep their principal organs at work during the long winter fast. Yet, even among human beings, cases of "trance" or "suspended animation" occasionally occur, during which the cycle of vital actions almost entirely ceases to all appearance for a considerable time, and then begins again on the application of some external or internal stimulus—which latter may be not unaptly compared to the slight shaking which we sometimes give a watch or clock to set it going when stopped by a momentary impediment. Persons recovered from drowning, in whom the cessation of action has been quite sudden and has not affected the structure of their organs, are often thus restored by the judicious use of rubbing and alcohol.