Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/829

Rh The camel presents a more interesting phenomenon in his well-known humps. These protuberances consist really of reserve-stores of fat, which the camel uses, not only for keeping up the action of his heart and lungs, but also for producing locomotion in his frequent enforced fasts among the deserts of Arabia or India. The humps dwindle away as he marches, in a manner exactly similar to that of the bear's fat during his hibernation, only of course much more rapidly, as they have so much more work to perform.

Finally, it may appear strange that the small amount of food we eat should suffice to carry our large and bulky bodies through all the varied movements of the day. But this difficulty disappears at once when we recollect how large an amount of energy can be laid by dormant in a very small piece of matter. A lump of coal no bigger than one's fist, if judiciously employed, will suffice to keep a small toy-engine at work for a considerable time. Now, our food is matter containing large amounts of dormant energy, and our bodies are engines constructed so as to utilize all the energy to the best advantage. A single gramme of beef-fat, if completely burned (that is, if every atom unites with oxygen), is capable of developing more than 9,000 heat-units; and each such heat-unit, if employed to perform mechanical work, is capable of lifting a weight of one gramme to a height of 424 metres; or, what comes to the same thing, 424 grammes to a height of one metre. Accordingly, the energy contained in one gramme of beef-fat (and the oxygen with which it unites) would be sufficient to raise the little bit of fat itself to a height of 3,816 kilometres, or about as high as from London to New York. Again, it may seem curious that the food eaten by the anaconda in South America, and stored up in its tissues, should suffice to keep up the action of its heart and lungs for so many months. But then we must remember that it performed very few other movements, most probably, during all that time; and if we think how small an amount of energy we expend in winding up an eight-day clock, and how infinitesimal a part of our dinner must have been used up in imparting to it the motion which will keep it swinging and ticking for one hundred and ninety-two hours, we can easily understand how the large amount of stored-up energy in the snake's muscles might very well serve to keep up its automatic actions for so long a time.

There are five hundred other little points which this mode of regarding our bodies at once clears up. It shows us why we are warmer after eating a meal, why cold is harder to endure when we are hungry, why we need so little food when we are lying in bed inactive, and so much when we are taking a walking tour or training for a boat-race, why cold-blooded animals eat so rarely and warm-blooded creatures so often, why we get thin when we take too little food, and why we lay on fat when we take too little exercise. But these and many other questions must be passed over in silence, or left to the reader's discrimination, lest I should make this paper tediously long. It must suffice for the