The History of a Mouthful of Bread / And its effect on the organization of men and animals

by Jean Macé

You ask what I am coming to now? My dear child, what I have just told you is the history of the hiccup—the history of the hiccup, neither more nor less.

I must first tell you, however, that the diaphragm keeps up intimate relations with his neighbor below—the stomach. Every time he rises in the breast the stomach rises behind him; and not only the stomach, but also its companions, the intestines. All the officials employed in the business of digestion travel regularly with him; coming down as well as going up in company. Put your hand upon your abdomen and breathe strongly and you will feel the rebound of all the movements of the diaphragm.

Now, when matters are going on wrongly inside, when too much work has been imposed on the officials, or work they dislike, or else when they have been disturbed in their labors, it will sometimes happen that the diaphragm takes part with his comrades in the abdomen. He gets angry then, and shakes his master, who cannot help himself a bit. You must be very well acquainted with these attacks, which are very fatiguing when they last long. One begs pardon and resists him in vain; he does as he pleases, without stopping to listen, turning everything upside down; and do you know the only efficacious plan for calming him at once? It was a constant source of wonder to me when I was little. A sudden fright, a start unexpectedly caused by a friendly hand slipping secretly behind, and laying hold of one, was all-sufficient; disarmed by the agitation you have undergone, the naughty, stubborn muscle forgives you, and you are cured.

Having dwelt so long on the truly wonderful resemblance between the proceedings of two sorts of beings, whom no one that I know of ever thought of comparing together before, I will now, my dear child, give you the key to all these comparisons, which seem so whimsical at first, but are so striking in reality, and which come to my pen of their own accord, as it were, in the midst of the explanations I have undertaken to give you. Many people who would not themselves care for them, will declare that they are too hard for a little girl to follow. But for my own part, I find that the eye can take in a mountain as easily as a fly, and that it is not more difficult to lay hold of great ideas than of little ones. It is short-sighted people, not children, who cannot see far before them. Who made the heavens and the earth? God, your catechism tells you. The same God made both; did he not? We do not acknowledge two. And if it be the self-same God who made everything, the hand of the universal Maker will be found everywhere; and from the highest to the lowest portion of His work the same mind will manifest itself under a thousand different forms. Not only, either, is each man separately, one by one, the work of God. The whole human race, taken in the mass, is also His creation; and the laws by which human society—that great body of the human race—seeks to regulate itself for the preservation of its existence, are undoubtedly the same as those which overruled the organization of our individual bodies. It is not very astonishing, then, if we find, in the life of human society around us, details corresponding with each detail of the life of the human body, or, at any rate, closely resembling them. What would really be astonishing, would be that mankind as a whole should be differently constituted from man as an individual, and that human society should have other appointed conditions of well-being than those of each of its members.

So, while I am on the subject, I should like to advise those who wishto apply themselves to what is called politics—that is to say, social life—to begin their studies of the body social, by studying the body human, first. They will learn more from it than from the newspapers!

But you have nothing to do with all this. For the present, take notice of one thing only; viz., that the hand of the same God has passed over everything, and that there is neither much presumption nor much merit in tracing points of comparison between the different parts of His work. These comparisons are not a mere play of the mind; they really exist ready made in the very foundations of things.

Now let us come down a little from these heights and return to our friends the lungs. I have not spoken about them for some time, and I have not yet told you how they are constructed.

I wish I could show you some, but the cook will do so, if you would like to see them. The lights with which she feeds the cat and the dog are the lungs of some animal.

Take up a piece in your hand, and you will find you have got hold of something light (cooks have not given it its name without a reason), which is also soft, sinks under your finger if you press it, and rises again afterwards like a sponge. In fact, the lung, like the sponge, is composed of an infinity of minute cells, whose elastic sides can be contracted or expanded at will. They are like so many little chambers, into every one of which blood and air keep running hastily, each on its own side, to bid good day to each other, touch hands, and then hurry out as briskly as they came in. Whether the bit of lights the cat is eating, comes from an ox, a pig, or a sheep, you may look at it with perfect confidence; your own lung is precisely like it. You would see nothing different, could you look into your own chest.

So much for the substance of the lungs. As to SHAPE, imagine two large, elongated packets, flat inside, descending right and left, inside the breast, and bearing the heart, suspended between the two, in the middle. The extremity of each packet descends below the heart, and it is in the interval which separates them that the arch of the diaphragm performs its up and down movement.