We can, if we like, dispense with either yeast or bacteria in the production of glycerin. Glucose syrup suspended in oil under steam pressure with finely divided nickel as a catalyst and treated with nascent hydrogen will take up the hydrogen and be converted into glycerin. But the yield is poor and the process expensive.
Food serves substantially the same purpose in the body as fuel in the engine. It provides the energy for work. The carbohydrates, that is the sugars, starches and celluloses, can all be used as fuels and can all—even, as we have seen, the cellulose—be used as foods. The final products, water and carbon dioxide, are in both cases the same and necessarily therefore the amount of energy produced is the same in the body as in the engine. Corn is a good example of the equivalence of the two sources of energy. There are few better foods and no better fuels. I can remember the good old days in Kansas when we had corn to burn. It was both an economy and a luxury, for—at ten cents a bushel—it was cheaper than coal or wood and preferable to either at any price. The long yellow ears, each wrapped in its own kindling, could be handled without crocking the fingers. Each kernel as it crackled sent out a blazing jet of oil and the cobs left a fine bed of coals for the corn popper to be shaken over. Driftwood and the pyrotechnic fuel they make now by soaking sticks in strontium and copper salts cannot compare with the old-fashioned corn-fed fire in beauty and the power of evoking visions. Doubtless such luxury would be condemned as wicked nowadays, but those who have known the calorific value of corn would find it hard to abandon it altogether, and I fancy that the Western farmer's wife, when she has an extra batch of baking to do, will still steal a few ears from the crib.
XI
SOLIDIFIED SUNSHINE
All life and all that life accomplishes depend upon the supply of solar energy stored in the form of food. The chief sources of this vital energy are the fats and the sugars. The former contain two and a quarter times the potential energy of the latter. Both, when completely purified, consist of nothing but carbon, hydrogen and oxygen; elements that are to be found freely everywhere in air and water. So when the sunny southland exports fats and oils, starches and sugar, it is then sending away nothing material but what comes back to it in the next wind. What it is sending to the regions of more slanting sunshine is merely some of the surplus of the radiant energy it has received so abundantly, compacted for convenience into a portable and edible form.
In previous chapters I have dealt with some of the uses of cotton, its employment for cloth, for paper, for artificial fibers, for explosives, and for plastics. But I have ignored the thing that cotton is attached to and for which, in the economy of nature, the fibers are formed; that is, the seed. It is as though I had described the aeroplane and ignored the aviator whom it was designed to carry. But in this neglect I am but following the example of the human race, which for three thousand years used the fiber but made no use of the seed except to plant the next crop.
Just as mankind is now divided into the two great classes, the wheat-eaters and the rice-eaters, so the ancient world was divided into the wool-wearers and the cotton-wearers. The people of India wore cotton; the Europeans wore wool. When the Greeks under Alexander fought their way to the Far East they were surprised to find wool growing on trees. Later travelers returning from Cathay told of the same marvel and travelers who stayed at home and wrote about what they had not seen, like Sir John Maundeville, misunderstood these reports and elaborated a legend of a tree that bore live lambs as fruit. Here, for instance, is how a French poetical botanist, Delacroix, described it in 1791, as translated from his Latin verse:
Upon a stalk is fixed a living brute,
A rooted plant bears quadruped for fruit;
It has a fleece, nor does it want for eyes,
And from its brows two wooly horns arise.
The rude and simple country people say
It is an animal that sleeps by day
And wakes at night, though rooted to the ground,
To feed on grass within its reach around.