"Dust thou art" is a somewhat erroneous description of the body from a biological point of view. It would be nearer the mark to say, "You are mainly—over ninety per cent.—solidified soda-water."
Still nearer was the observation of a witty physiologist, that the greatest man on earth is only so much white of egg alive. To be strictly accurate, one should say that a man is an exceedingly complex mixture of gases, liquids, and solids, into all of which he will ultimately revert.
HERE IS A POUND OF CANDLES. THE BODY HAS ENOUGH FAT TO MAKE FROM 3¾ TO 7½ LBS.
At the same time, this wonderful machine that walks, eats, thinks, talks, laughs, cries, and fights, consists of a very few simple elements. And, although we get our building materials from a wonderful variety of substances gathered from the four corners of the earth in the form of meat, fruits, vegetables, and condiments, they are to be found, as everyone knows, in any dairyman's shop. If one only knew how to do it, he could take 1,200 eggs, whisk them up, and build a complete and perfect man of 150 lbs. weight.
Solid as our body is, it is mostly made up of gases. The five familiar gases, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, chlorine, fluorine, and the three well-known solids, carbon, phosphorus, and lime—or, rather, calcium—constitute all but a trifling fraction of our whole bulk.
The mystery of life never does seem so deep as when one reflects that, by the mixture of these few substances in various proportions, nature makes kings, poets, warriors, saints, burglars, thieves, and all the rest of the great human hotch-potch.
To build a one-hundred-and-fifty pound man, only fourteen elements, altogether, are needed. Five of them are the above-named gases—there is enough gas in a man to fill a gasometer of 3,649 cubic feet—and nine are solids, found in almost any handful of clay you might take up at random; that is to say, carbon, calcium, phosphorus, iron, sulphur, sodium, potassium, silicon, and magnesium. In most people minute quantities of a few other things are found, such as copper, aluminium, manganese, lead, mercury, arsenic, and lithium; but these substances are probably always trespassers.
THERE IS ENOUGH GAS IN A MAN TO FILL A GASOMETER OF 3,649 CUBIC FEET.