The Chautauquan, Vol. 03, February 1883 / A Monthly Magazine Devoted to the Promotion of True Culture. / Organ of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle.

by Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle; Chautauqua Institution

[ADVANTAGE OF WARM CLOTHING.]

There are men, called chemists, who know a great deal concerning the nature of different kinds of substances, and who, in consequence of this knowledge, are able to bring about very surprising changes and effects. These men have places, termed laboratories, or labor shops, in which they work, and which are divided into distinct chambers, besides being furnished with all sorts of instruments and vessels. Sometimes liquids are put into these chambers and vessels, and there turned into solids. Sometimes both liquids and solids are converted into invisible air. Sometimes beautiful crystals, white and blue, green and red, are brought out of transparent and colorless fluids. Sometimes a few grains of dusty looking powder are made to vanish into smoke with an explosion that shakes the ground for yards; and sometimes waste rubbish is transformed into delicious scents, resembling those which are produced from the violet and the rose. Even dull, black charcoal has been changed into the sparkling and precious diamond. It would require a very large book merely to number the wonderful feats these men of science are able to perform. Chemists, indeed, in the present day can do much more by their knowledge and skill, than magicians pretended they could accomplish in the olden time.

Chemists make use of many very powerful agents in their laboratories, to aid them in carrying out their objects and plans. Among these agents there are two that stand before all the rest both in strength and in general usefulness. These prime assistants of the chemists are fire and water. The water is employed to dissolve substances whose little particles it is desired to bring closely together. When two different liquids thus formed are mixed, all the particles in the two come together and act upon one another. Fire is used to soften substances, and loosen the hold of their little particles upon each other, so that they may afterwards be readily mixed together. Water dissolves bodies; that is, makes them liquid by uniting them with itself. Fire melts bodies; that is, makes them liquid without the aid of water.

Now there is one object which the chemists often have in view, when they put different kinds of substances together, in a dissolved or liquid state, in the chambers and vessels of their laboratories; that is, to get something out of those substances, which was before hidden away in them, in order that they may turn that something to practical use. Thus the chemist mixes together saltpetre, sulphur, and charcoal in the right proportions to make gunpowder. Then having rammed a charge of the gunpowder down into the tube of a gun, with a bullet on the top of a charge, he applies a spark to the gunpowder, and makes it change into smoke and vapor. Something which was hidden away in the gunpowder ceases to be concealed when it is changed into smoke and vapor, and becomes active enough to be able to drive the bullet out of the muzzle of the gun with a force that carries it through the air for a mile, and perhaps then buries it deep in the ground, or in a plank of wood. This is an instance of the way in which chemists produce motion, by changing the state and condition of material substance.

I had occasion the other day to watch a still more interesting example of this strange result of the chemist’s skill. In a chemist’s laboratory, prepared for a particular service, I saw several small chambers of metal, half copper and half zinc, into which were poured blue vitriol and water, and an acid, a partition wall of pipe-clay standing between. The dilute acid and the zinc were slowly turning into white vitriol, which remained dissolved away in the water; but out of this new-made white vitriol there flowed a power, which was conveyed along a wire, and which made a needle, hung up on a pivot before me, twitch from side to side, almost as if it had been a living thing. I was told that this power set free in the solution, in consequence of the changes brought about there, would run along the wire to the distance of a hundred, or even of a thousand miles, and would there make another needle work and twitch in the same way. In short, I was looking at the electric telegraph at work, and learning that the agent which made the signal afar was simply a power that had been hidden away in the different substances the chemist put together in the metal chambers, and that was set free and enabled to operate in the production of independent motion, so soon as those substances acted upon one another, and altered the form and state in which each was existing.

Now, my good friend, your living body, and my own, are laboratories, in which changes of precisely the same kind are constantly brought about; your living body, and my own, are made of an enormous quantity of separate chambers and vessels, very small, it is true, but nevertheless such as can be seen quite distinctly when they are looked for with the microscope. In these small chambers and vessels different kinds of substances are thrown together, exactly as the zinc, and acid, and blue vitriol are in the laboratory-chambers of the electric telegraph. The chambers and vessels of the living laboratory lie between meshes of the supply pipes of the body, and it is indeed their minute cavities which are drenched by the circulating streams of the dissolved food (see “Value of Good Food”), and in which that dissolved food gets to be transformed into flesh and fat, gristle and bone, tendons and skin, fibres and nerves. The blood, which is pumped forth with such vigor from the heart, creeps along slowly through the smallest and furthest branches of the supply-pipes, in order that plenty of time may be given for all these changes to be worked out in the chambers of the frame. But the fibres and skin, the flesh and the nerves, when they have been built up, are also changed into waste substance by admixture with yet other ingredients which the blood brings to the little chambers. In the cavities of the living laboratory, as in those of the electric telegraph, these changes of substance lead to the setting free of agents before concealed, which agents then operate in the production of movements and of other living effects. When I now raise my arm up above my head, I am able to do so because some of the flesh of which my arm is composed, is changed into another kind of substance, the moving power being set free during the change. When I feel this hard stone which I take up in my hand, I am able to do so because some of the substance of which my body is made, is changed into another kind of material at the instant that I feel. This, then, is how strength comes out of food. The food is changed into flesh, and the flesh is converted into two distinct parts, waste substance and moving and living power. The power was originally concealed in the food, placed there by the provident hand of the Divine Author of Nature, in order that it might be forthcoming for this useful service when it was required. In simple words, material substance is destroyed in order that power may be extracted from it. Material substance, in living bodies, is turned into power. This is the mechanism by which God works in these, the most wonderful of the productions of his hands.

It will hardly be necessary, after all that has been already said elsewhere, to point out that the prime assistant of the chemist, water, acts in the living laboratory exactly as it does in the artificial ones. It loosens, dissolves, and mingles together the various substances which are to act upon one another. It is in the dissolved food, and the liquid blood, which flow into all the chambers and vessels of the living body, and which build up in them the fibres of living structure, and then transform and destroy those fibres, in order that the power there stored away may be obtained.

But it is still more remarkable that the other prime assistant of the chemist, fire, should also be employed in the living frame, in loosening its particles, and in quickening the operation of the various changes of substance upon which the production of power depends. It has been shown that in the body of a full-grown man there is as much heat produced in a single day, as would serve to make eighty pints of cold water boil, and it has also been stated that this heat is produced in the body exactly in the same way heat is produced in the steam engine; that is, by the burning of fuel. The heat is set free by the change of condition in material substance, precisely as power is procured. When the water employed in a steam engine is made to boil, the heat that causes the boiling issues from the coal, because that substance ceases to be coal, and turns into smoke and vapor. Just so the fuel substance of the body ceases to be fuel substance, starch, sugar, and fat—and turns into vapor, which is steamed away, leaving the heat which was concealed in the substance to warm the frame.

The furnace which is kept burning in the living laboratory, to quicken all the operations which are being carried forward in it, and to furnish its strength, is a slow and gentle one. It never burns quickly enough to cause light and flame, as common fires do. The body is never even raised to the heat of boiling water, which is far less than that of burning coal. It is only made of blood-heat; that is, sixty-eight degrees of the heat-scale warmer than freezing water,—in its warmest parts. Boiling water is one hundred and eighty degrees of the same heat-scale warmer than freezing water. The furnace of the living body sometimes burns a little more quickly than it ought, then the body gets warmed into fever. Occasionally it burns considerably less quickly than it ought, then the body is chilled, and its living actions and powers are slothful and languid. Upon the whole, however, its heat is steadily kept up at pretty much what it ought to be, that is, at one hundred degrees of the scale, which gives thirty-two degrees for frost.

Now this is how the furnace of the living body is kept smouldering on in its gentle and even way. Little blasts of air are constantly puffed in upon the burning fuel. That out-and-in play of your chest as you breathe,—that is the puffing of air blasts into certain chambers of your living laboratory, to keep up its smouldering fires. The more quickly and deeply you breathe, the warmer your body becomes; and the more slowly and softly you breathe, the colder that body remains. The same action which blows a fresh wind through the living frame to clear away its impure vapors, also serves to fan its hidden flames, and keep its fuel burning. When the breathing is stopped the fires of the body go out, just as those in a common furnace do, when their air-blasts are arrested, and the body becomes dead cold.