Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/557

Rh some difference between those which can drink a little and those which drink a great deal. The last die sooner.

There is always less suffering when it is possible to drink; for it is a characteristic of privation that thirst torments more than hunger, and those who have told of what they have suffered on such occasions have usually emphasized this fact. But I do not believe that the hour of death is much delayed by the ingestion of drinks.

In considering cases of fasts endured by men, we have to distinguish between the experimental fast, carefully arranged for and limited to a certain number of days; the fast which I call charlatanish; and the compulsory fast, which is inflicted upon persons who have been surprised by accidents, such as shipwrecks or land-slides, or who have been left in the wastes of the desert.

—Mr. Ranke, a German physiologist, felt no great inconvenience for forty-eight hours, and his worst sufferings were in the earlier stage. His symptoms were great muscular weakness, impossibility of sustaining prolonged movements, fibrillary shiverings, and headache. The most striking phenomena were insomnia with nightmare and throbbing in the head. Beginning nineteen hours after he had taken his last food, he determined by experiment what was his daily diminution of weight, and the rate of consumption of carbon and nitrogen per kilogramme and per hour. He found that the consumption of carbon was twenty times that of nitrogen; that he lost in weight about 1·2 gramme per kilogramme per hour; and that he produced fourteen litres of carbonic acid per kilogramme per hour. The last number is important. In the normal condition we produce eighteen litres of carbonic acid per kilogramme and per hour. As Mr. Ranke's case was not one of illness or any kind of weakness, the question arises as to the purpose served by these four litres of surplus carbonic acid. The most obvious answer is that they are a luxury. In some experiments which I made, the rate of production by my subject, while fourteen litres during the fast, rose by one third after he had eaten a hearty meal, and his respiration increased in a like proportion.

In the cases of the celebrated fasters Tanner, Succi, and Merlatti, while it may be hard to prove that there was no fraud, the precautions taken against it seem to have been ample to make it extremely improbable. They, moreover, all endured their fasts under special conditions. Merlatti ate a fat goose, bones and all, before beginning; Succi took a drink to which he attached great importance. The diminution of weight was less considerable than in the other subjects mentioned, but in Merlatti's case the whole amounted to twenty-seven per cent at the end of the fifty days,