A LITTLE MAID FROM SPAIN.
1,200 EGGS, OR 120 TIMES AS MANY AS REPRESENTED HERE, CONTAIN ALL THAT IS NECESSARY FOR THE COMPOSITION OF A 150 LB. MAN.
MAN IS MADE OF—WHAT?
SOME FACTS ABOUT YOURSELF.
By T. F. Manning.
It is rarely realised what a queer combination of things exists in the human body. When the reader glances at these pages he will wonder whatever matches, candles, balloons, sugar-basins, soap, and all the other things illustrated have to do with the making of a man. At first sight the illustrations seem extraordinarily out of place; but when this article has been read through, he will then understand that the body is more or less of a chandler's shop in the making, for it is intended to show, in everyday language, something of its marvellous construction.
"Dust thou art" is a somewhat erroneous description of the body from a biological point of view. It would be nearer the mark to say, "You are mainly—over ninety per cent.—solidified soda-water."
Still nearer was the observation of a witty physiologist, that the greatest man on earth is only so much white of egg alive. To be strictly accurate, one should say that a man is an exceedingly complex mixture of gases, liquids, and solids, into all of which he will ultimately revert.
HERE IS A POUND OF CANDLES. THE BODY HAS ENOUGH FAT TO MAKE FROM 3¾ TO 7½ LBS.
At the same time, this wonderful machine that walks, eats, thinks, talks, laughs, cries, and fights, consists of a very few simple elements. And, although we get our building materials from a wonderful variety of substances gathered from the four corners of the earth in the form of meat, fruits, vegetables, and condiments, they are to be found, as everyone knows, in any dairyman's shop. If one only knew how to do it, he could take 1,200 eggs, whisk them up, and build a complete and perfect man of 150 lbs. weight.
Solid as our body is, it is mostly made up of gases. The five familiar gases, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, chlorine, fluorine, and the three well-known solids, carbon, phosphorus, and lime—or, rather, calcium—constitute all but a trifling fraction of our whole bulk.
The mystery of life never does seem so deep as when one reflects that, by the mixture of these few substances in various proportions, nature makes kings, poets, warriors, saints, burglars, thieves, and all the rest of the great human hotch-potch.
To build a one-hundred-and-fifty pound man, only fourteen elements, altogether, are needed. Five of them are the above-named gases—there is enough gas in a man to fill a gasometer of 3,649 cubic feet—and nine are solids, found in almost any handful of clay you might take up at random; that is to say, carbon, calcium, phosphorus, iron, sulphur, sodium, potassium, silicon, and magnesium. In most people minute quantities of a few other things are found, such as copper, aluminium, manganese, lead, mercury, arsenic, and lithium; but these substances are probably always trespassers.
THERE IS ENOUGH GAS IN A MAN TO FILL A GASOMETER OF 3,649 CUBIC FEET.
Far and away the most important element in flesh and bone is oxygen, and the bulk of that energetic gas which remains tranquilly compressed within us is something marvellous. In a ten-stone-ten man the weight of oxygen is no less than 106 lbs., and the natural bulk of it, if it were set free, would be equal to a beam of wood one foot square and 1,191 feet—nearly a quarter of a mile—long, or several hundred times the bulk of the body itself. Measured by the gallon it would fill 202 36-gallon barrels.
Even bulkier, though lighter, is the constituent hydrogen. Every man's body contains sufficient of this lightest of all substances to inflate a balloon that would lift himself, balloon, and tackle. In the ten-stone-ten man, for instance, the bulk of hydrogen is over 2,400 cubic feet—equal to the cubic space of a room ten feet high and 15½ feet square, and the weight of it is a trifle short of 13½ lbs.
Of that inexplicable gas, nitrogen, there is about half an ounce to each pound of body weight, or, approximately, 4½ lbs. altogether, in a 150 lb. man. It is about twenty times the bulk of the body, and by no means likes being cramped up in a space of a few cubic inches. This is the most inert gas known. Its bulk in the body is 58 cubic feet.
The reason it is said to be lifeless is that it hates every other element in the world; and, while oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, and the other things, like the Continental Powers, cannot live alone, nitrogen, like England, will not, if it can possibly avoid it, live in company. From this trait arises not only all the action of the human brain and the strength of the muscles, but the terrible force of all the great explosives. While individually without any energy whatever, when it does chance to enter into union with other things nitrogen becomes the most energetic substance in existence.
The great explosive force of nitroglycerine is due to azote. One of the most frightful explosives known is chloride of nitrogen, which goes off if the sun shines on it, or if a leaf touches it; and, in the human body, it is the breaking down of nitrogen compounds which actually constitutes life. Nothing can be alive without nitrogen, itself the type of death.
The last of the substances of any bulk in the body is carbon. There is, as nearly as possible, a sack of 21½ lbs. in a ten-stone-ten man, sufficient to make some sixty-five gross of lead pencils, sixty-five times as many as represented in our picture. It is veritably the fuel of the body, which both keeps us warm and gives us energy to move.
FIVE TACKS LIKE THESE CAN BE MADE FROM THE 48 GRAINS OF IRON IN THE BODY.
Thus it is the mainspring of animal life, which consists altogether of moving and keeping the body warm; the entire mechanism of the body, eyes to see, mouth and hands to grasp, stomach to digest, heart to circulate, and lungs to supply air, being designed to effect these two simple operations.
Although the above four elements form between 145 and 146 of a man's 150 lbs. of blood, flesh, and bone, the few pounds of the remaining elements are absolutely essential.
A MAN CONTAINS ENOUGH HYDROGEN TO FILL A BALLOON THAT WOULD LIFT HIMSELF—2,400 CUBIC FEET.
The erect posture, of which men are so proud, although it makes them the slowest-moving creatures of their size on earth and exposes them to all sorts of accidents, is due, primarily, to the two pounds of calcium and twenty-four ounces of phosphorus in their bodies. Without these, we should have no arms, legs, skulls, or teeth; we should have to crawl like worms, and to live on some pap-like food.
It seems very extraordinary, but if anyone works it out he will see that, if the body had to get on without its two pounds of common lime, there would be no machinery, ships, or railways, no guns and swords, no houses and cities, and human life would entirely consist of crawling out of some hole in the ground at sunrise, chewing berries and leaves, and crawling under the earth again at night.
Therefore, it is impossible to single out any element and say, "This is the most important element of the body." For not only the two pounds of lime, but the pound and a half of phosphorus, and the far less quantity of iron, are as essential as the 106 lbs. of oxygen.
What is most curious about phosphorus is that, being a powerful and terrible poison, the body can contain such a lot of it without suffering injury. Sufficient is scattered among the bones, the flesh, the nervous system, and the various organs to kill off a whole village, or to supply it with all the matches it requires. For the body contains sufficient phosphorus to make 8,064 boxes of matches containing 60 matches each.
What phosphorus does for the bones is plain enough. With calcium and oxygen it forms the exceedingly hard phosphate of calcium that gives the bones their rigidity.
No one appears to be perfectly sure what part it plays in the other tissues of the body. Something very forcible, certainly, for whenever sufficient is not present we grow listless; and nothing tones up the system, in some states of low health, like a course of phosphorus medication. If phosphorus is not precisely, as many people suppose, the element that gives man his intellectual power, it is absolutely essential to a high degree of nervous efficiency.
THE BODY IS A SOAP FACTORY, AND GENERALLY CONTAINS MATTER SUFFICIENT FOR A CAKE THIS SIZE.
The amount of other elements may be set down as follows:—Chlorine, 4 ozs.; sodium, 3 ozs.; sulphur, 2½ ozs.; fluorine, 2 ozs.; potassium, 1 oz.; magnesium, 12 grs.; silicon, 2 grs.
Estimates vary, however, and, as a matter of fact, the quantities of the elements in different men are by no means the same, nor are they always from day to day the same in any one individual. But, taking the whole of these last-named substances, they probably seldom exceed three-quarters of a pound, yet the machine would come to a dead stop without them.
Without iron, for instance, the blood could not carry oxygen, as it does, from the lungs to the remotest parts of the organism. There are only 48 grains, or one-tenth of an ounce, of iron in the blood; in the whole body there is only sufficient to make four or five tacks—vital tacks, for if you took them away from the body of the strongest man he would drop dead.
Sodium and potassium are equally necessary, and so are sulphur, chlorine, and fluorine.
But the part these take in the processes of life is better seen by observing what combinations they form and what ends these combinations serve. No element exists in the body alone and separate, except, indeed, some accidental traces of oxygen, nitrogen, and a few particles of carbon breathed in by the lungs. They are all present in compounds of extraordinary complexity, mostly put together in the vegetable world, as everyone knows, by some mysterious power of the sun.
And, as was said, all the force of the body is derived from breaking these complex compounds down into simpler combinations. We don't get all the good possible out of them, for we cannot dissociate them into separate elements, because elements have a horror of living separate, and it would take something more powerful than a man's bodily organs to make them do so.
A PILE OF
144 PENCILS.
65 TIMES AS
MANY AS THESE CAN BE MADE FROM THE 21½ LBS. OF CARBON IN THE BODY.
Simple water is the most important compound of all—at least, the most abundant—consisting of hydrogen two parts, and oxygen one part. There are from 90 to 96 lbs., or say a barrel of 9½ gallons, of pure water in a ten-stone-ten man. It has a large number of uses, but the main use is rather curious.
The greater part of bone and fat is what might be called lifeless tissue. The substance that makes the body alive is protoplasm, which forms the chief bulk of muscle, brain, nerves, lungs, heart, etc. And protoplasm exists in the shape of millions of minute globules set side by side, and more or less welded together. But these could no more live out of water than could a shoal of herrings. So that, wherever in the body protoplasm is—and it is almost everywhere—not only is it submerged in water, but it actually passes its whole existence in running water.
Nothing could be done in the body without water. It dissolves the food, carries the blood corpuscles, moistens the lining membranes of the mouth, nose, throat, and all the inside of the body, forms a sort of water cushion around the heart, lungs, and organs of the abdomen, cools us by evaporation as sweat, and does many other useful things. And the more water in the body the more vigorous the life. Restless children have more than adults, and the sluggishness of old age is in great measure due to a sort of bodily drought.
Ordinary table salt, a mixture of solid sodium and gaseous chlorine, does a lot of work in the human body. It seems necessary to the life of every organ, and is found in the blood, muscles, and all the other fluids and solids. It helps the fluids to pass through the thin membranes, so that as well as promoting the absorption of food from intestines and stomach into the blood current it also promotes the percolation of the blood from the minute arteries out into the tissues.
Experiments show that if salt be withheld from an animal he quickly languishes and dies. Yet there are only between six and seven ounces in the whole human fabric, but quite enough to provide a large size dinner table with it. Singularly the body is rather extravagant with its small supply of this important constituent, and loses half an ounce every day.
SALT SUFFICIENT TO FILL THIS CELLAR SIX OR SEVEN TIMES GOES TO THE MAKING OF A MAN.
Washing soda, or sodium in union with carbon and oxygen, is another substance which performs an indispensable duty. Dissolved in the blood it travels to every part of the body on a mission analogous to that of the useful dustman. Wherever it finds a particle of carbonic acid it seizes it, carries it to the lungs, and discharges it into the air. The quantity of washing soda in the blood is really very small, but the work it does is immense.
You cannot perform any action without making a given quantity of poisonous carbonic acid. Every beat of the heart and rise of the chest, even bending the finger or closing the eyes, gives rise to some of this waste product. And, if it were not continuously removed, it would fatally clog the machine in a very few minutes. The washing soda performs the necessary scavenging duty.
This washing soda is also an important part of bone; mingled with phosphate of lime, phosphate of magnesia, and fluoride of lime, it helps to make our bones and teeth.
Smelling salts seems a funny thing to have within you, but it is there. Sodium, potassium, and ammonium are mixed with hydrogen and oxygen to make it—the pungent ammonia, as well as the soda and potash which are the cleansing principles of soap. These are distributed through all the flesh of the body and are present in the blood. Together with the phosphates they keep the blood and other fluids alkaline. This means that they preserve us from another of the many conditions fatal to life, for if the blood turned acid we should die.
Chloride of ammonium, the familiar inhalement, is another of what might be called the body's spices; so is chloride of potash, a sort of cousin of the popular sore throat cure; and so also is hydrochloric acid.
This last substance is, again, one of those trifles without which existence would be impossible. In the stomach there is a trifling quantity of it, manufactured as required, which kills most of the microbes, we swallow in food, prevents fermentation, and helps digestion.
There are ever so many other inorganic compounds. Besides these, all civilised bodies contain a regular laboratory of adulterants, such as boric acid and salicylic acid taken with milk, butter, and meat, and kept some time in the body; iron, copper, antimony, arsenic, and many other things taken in tea, beer, bottled vegetables, and the like.
SUGAR MAKING IS CARRIED ON IN THE BODY—THOUGH THERE IS NEVER MORE THAN A BOWLFUL OF IT.
From these comparatively simple bodies we go up to what are called the organic compounds. There is a whole host of organic acids. Of course these are present in very small quantities, or else they would dissolve us like so much sugar.
The salts, the acids, and the elements are still more complexly associated. One mixture of them forms the proteid or albuminous substance which scarcely differs from white of egg. It is this alone, in fact, that lives. It is the chief solid part of muscle, heart, lung, brain, nerve, blood, and exists in every fluid and solid of the body (including sweat and saliva), except bile and one other substance. What distinguishes proteid from everything else is that it contains the lifeless gas nitrogen.
Perhaps the nearest approach one could give to a definition of life is that it consists of the separation of the carbon and nitrogen of proteid substance.
The proteid is taken into the body ready-made, in milk, meat, eggs, fish, and to a less extent in vegetables.
"Hamlet" and "King Lear," the "Iliad" and "Paradise Lost," every speech and sermon one hears, and every book one reads, is really for the most part this dissociation of carbon from nitrogen in another man's brain, made evident to our eyes or ears. And this dissociation is nothing more than if you took some white of egg and mixed with it a quantity of oxygen so as to form urea, carbonic acid, and water.
THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN THE BODY—A BARREL OF 9½ GALLONS OF WATER.
Starch and fat supply fuel both in reserve and for immediate consumption. They are only so much carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen mingled in certain proportions and pretty similar to sugar. But they go through curious careers in the body. Most of the fat that one swallows, for instance, meets an alkali in the intestines that has come there specially from the liver and pancreas to make soap.
In the average man some tons of excellent soap are made in a life-time, and at times there must be quite a large cake of soap in the intestines. A quantity of glycerine is also formed as a by-product, just as in a regular soap factory. The body can itself make fat. If you give it lean meat, or starch, or sugar, it will take them as raw material and manufacture good fat.
Starch, a most important constituent, goes through strange transformations. When you swallow a potato it is chiefly starch; that is, six atoms of carbon to ten of hydrogen and five of oxygen. In the intestines a little water is added and it becomes sugar, for sugar is merely starch and water joined together. It goes into the blood as sugar, not being able, in fact, to get through as starch, and then it either burns up in the tissues or goes to the liver, where it drops the water and becomes a kind of starch.
The moment one feels hungry this glycogen changes into sugar again, enters the blood, and is burned up, like a candle, into carbonic acid and water. Sugar in the body is like loose cash in the pocket—it does not stay long; and there seldom is a bowlful of it. But, in some extraordinary way, if the body wishes to be saving, it sometimes converts the sugar into a substance called inosit, which, though sweet, is insoluble in water, and can, therefore, remain a long time in the liver, spleen, lungs, and muscle, being very abundant in the muscle of drunkards.
There are many other compound substances in the body. Alcohol is found in blood, bile, muscle, and brain; gum in the glands that make saliva, and in the lungs; pepsin, that digests food, in the stomach; one or two ferments, like yeast; and the pigments that colour the hair and the eye. None of these higher compounds is put together by the body. It never takes the elements and builds them up. It can only break down complex things into less complex things.
But it does one kind of manufacturing or constructive work, using complex and ready-made substances, that is amazing. No one who has eaten a cutlet, a sweet-bread, a kidney, a piece of liver, heart, tongue, and tripe, need be reminded how various are the different organs in composition. All this variety, however, the body brings about itself, marvellously selecting from the one raw material, blood, the different substances and the appropriate quantities for each kind of tissue.
Out of the blood the body takes the compounds containing calcium, phosphorus, oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, and some other things, for the making of the skeleton. The skeleton exists for the sole purpose of giving support to the other parts, and forms 14 hundredths, or about one-seventh, of the body-weight in a man, and 13 hundredths, or about one-eighth, in a woman.
Thus a man of ten-stone-ten would have to carry a skeleton weighing 21 lbs.—that is, while quite fresh. When dry it would weigh only 12½ lbs. In a woman of eight stone the weights would be 14 lbs. and 8½ lbs. respectively.
To make muscle, the body takes other substances in appropriate quantities from the blood. Whether you are weak and powerless, or fit to form one of an Oxford eight and to lift weights with Sandow, depends, to a considerable extent, on the selective skill of your blood.
The muscular system constitutes three-sevenths of the structure, contains half the water and half the proteid of the entire body, and weighs, in a ten-stone-ten man, between 63 and 64 lbs.
Fat is taken from the blood mostly ready-formed, and is stored away as packing material and reserve food. It is the most inconstant of all tissues in quantity, and varies with every change of health, air, diet, work, and with each important life-event. But, usually, it averages from one-fortieth to one-twentieth of the body weight, or from 3¾ to 7½ lbs. in a ten-stone-ten man, enough to make several pounds of candles like those we have photographed.
8,064 BOXES OF MATCHES LIKE THESE CAN BE MADE FROM THE PHOSPHORUS IN A MAN.
The blood itself is manufactured in the body, one part by certain organs, another part by other organs. The making of it is still not fully understood. But the body knows when it has and has not sufficient. If one loses a pint of blood, the vessels take in a pint of water from the tissues in a very short period, and soon they have that water loaded with ingredients to bring it up to standard strength.
So the actual bulk and weight of blood scarcely ever varies in the same person, although it may be quite different in different individuals. For the average man it may be set down at from one-fourteenth to one-twelfth of the body weight—that is, between 10¾ and 12½ lbs. Women and fat men have proportionately less.
The remainder of the body-weight is made up of the heavy liver, the light lungs, the heart, spleen, pancreas, kidneys, intestines, brain, nerves, skin, hair, nails. And all these sundries weigh from 45 to 51 lbs.
It will be seen that a man is made on a different principle from that on which he makes most of the structures of civilised life. He builds them for long endurance; he builds himself for quick destruction. Nothing in him is permanent, or intended to be, except the skeleton and teeth. Westminster Abbey contains all the materials of a man's body, but it has been made into a compound edifice out of simple lime, wood, stone, etc., with the intention that it shall remain compound as long as possible. A man's body is constructed of compound substances so placed together that, by their interaction, they shall speedily and without ceasing break each other down into simple substances; and life is thus, as was said, essentially a process of destruction.
All these facts will help us to realise the wonders of the human body, and will substantiate the somewhat startling statement that the body is something of a chandler's shop.
