And for what purpose, do you suppose?
Unquestionably it must be to make a fire, since they never come together without doing so.
But what do people make fires for? I ask next. Well! surely to warm themselves, do they not?
And this is the history of your body being warm exactly like a dining-room stove, where the oxygen in the air forms an alliance with the hydrogen and carbon of the wood. Nature warms little girls inside, on precisely the same plan by which men warm their houses in winter.
Imagine, then, a little stove, furnished with little arms for helping itself out of the wood-basket as it is wanted, and with little legs to run and refill it when it is empty; the fire must be always burning there, and the stove must be always warm.
Just such a little stove is your body; your mouth being the little door, by which there constantly enter—not wood, that would hardly be pleasant—but—hydrogen and carbon under the forms of bread, mutton broth, cakes, sweetmeats, and all the good things people have learnt to make with sugar, fat, and flour. There is hydrogen and carbon in everything we eat, as I have already told you; but sugar, fat, flour, and wine are the substances which contain them in the greatest quantities, and consequently they are our best combustibles.
You are surprised, perhaps, at wine being a combustible; wine, which you think would put out rather than make a fire.
And it would. But that is only because in it, what is good for burning is mixed with a great deal of water, which prevents our being able to set it on fire. But if part of this water is withdrawn, you have brandy, which lights easily enough; and if part of the remaining water is withdrawn from the brandy, you have spirits of wine, which takes fire more easily still. If you have ever seen a spirit-of-wine lamp, you must know something about this. Judge from that what a fire spirits of wine must make in the body, even when it has a good deal of water with it; for it is right to tell you that your little stove is very superior to the one in the dining-room, and that it hunts out for consumption the smallest portions of combustible matter, in places where the other would be a good deal puzzled to find them.
This is not all, however. I have much greater wonders to tell you yet.
What should you say to a stove, which, summer or winter, night or day, in rain or sunshine, amid the ice of the pole, or under the sun of the equator, was able to keep itself constantly in the same condition; neither hotter nor colder one minute than another, whether you gave it much or little fuel, at a given moment, and sometimes when you gave it nothing for whole days together? It would be worthy of a fairy tale, would it not? Yet the human body is a stove of this description.