Natural Wonders

by Edwin Tenney Brewster

Unfortunately, we cannot live altogether on these clean-burning fats and starches and sugars, which explode to carbon dioxid and water, and leave nothing more behind than a wax candle when it burns. We can’t make our life-jelly out of these foods. So we have to eat also, eggs and milk and cheese and beans and peas and meat and fish, some parts of which we can build to our life-jelly. But only about a tenth part of our food needs to be of any of these life-jelly-making sorts. The other nine-tenths should be the clean-burning things with which we do most of our work and play.

But whatever the fuel with which we run our bodily engines, sooner or later it gets used up and the waste products have to be blown off into the air. Insects and automobiles, which take the air pretty directly into their cells, blow off their waste gases directly into the air again. The lowly creatures which breath the air in the water, send their carbon dioxid back into the water again. But we who have blood, use that to carry off our exploded sugar and other things.

The water of the burned up food is simply added to the watery part of the blood. The carbon dioxid becomes in the blood ordinary cooking soda; the blood carries the soda to the lungs, and there it changes to carbon dioxid again, exactly as it does when, as cooking soda, or baking powder, you add it to flour and use it to raise cake. Finally it comes out of the lungs with the breath, and that is the end of it so far as we are concerned.

Still, we are not through with it yet; because the plants take in thru their leaves the carbon dioxid that we animals breath out thru our lungs, take it apart again, mix it up with water and other things which they get thru their roots, and finally make it over into wood, and into starch and sugar and the like which we animals eat up once more. So if we eat the plants, the plants also eat us; and the same stuff keeps getting used over and over again. And a mighty convenient arrangement it is, too, since there is precious little stuff to make living things out of in the world at best. Most of the earth is just rocks.

However, I started to tell you something about the burnt up food and exploded muscle-sugar, While it is still in the body, before blood and lungs and skin and kidneys have combined to carry it away.

Did you ever stop to think why you are sleepy when night comes? You play hard all day, running about until your legs are tired enough to drop off. By and by, you begin to be sleepy, an hour or two it may be before your proper bed time. You are tired in your legs. But you are sleepy in your eyes. Your legs are not sleepy in the least; and your eyes are not tired. How did the eyes find out that the legs had been running hard and needed sleep?

It is these same waste matters in the blood. We run our legs off by day; and by night time a hundred thousand little explosions in our muscles have used up so much sugar and the rest, that the blood is filled with the waste material, and the lungs cannot carry it off.

So it stays in the blood and poisons us—not badly, but just about as much as if we had taken a small dose of laudanum or alcohol or any of the large number of sleepy poisons, which kill one by putting him to sleep so hard that he cannot wake up. Our “fatigue toxins” as we call them (which is simply Latin for poisons that we make by getting tired) poison us just enough to make us sleep. While we sleep we don’t do much; less of these toxins are formed; the lungs and kidneys have time to catch up with their work; pretty soon the blood is clear again, and we wake up in the morning ready to do it all over once more. We are made to stand a certain amount of poisoning, and get over it. The trouble comes when we poison ourselves With things that we put into our blood, that we might have kept out.

Did you ever think why, after you have been running hard for a long time, your legs ache? Or why they stop aching when you sit down to rest, but don’t stop at once? It is these same fatigue toxins. You explode your muscle cells faster than the blood can wash away the products of the explosions. So these accumulate. By and by, they begin to poison the muscle, and you begin to feel the pain. If you keep on working, as people have to sometimes in spite of weariness, the ache and the poisoning gets worse and worse, till the muscle simply refuses to work any longer.

If you stop to rest, the ache of weariness still continues. But after a little, the blood stream washes the muscle clean. Then the ache is gone, and you can get up and run again. Nevertheless, a whole day’s play or work will so load up the blood with toxins that it can no longer wash the muscle clean. Then you must take a longer rest, go to sleep, and give time for the blood itself to clean up.