A MAN CONTAINS ENOUGH HYDROGEN TO FILL A BALLOON THAT WOULD LIFT HIMSELF—2,400 CUBIC FEET.
The erect posture, of which men are so proud, although it makes them the slowest-moving creatures of their size on earth and exposes them to all sorts of accidents, is due, primarily, to the two pounds of calcium and twenty-four ounces of phosphorus in their bodies. Without these, we should have no arms, legs, skulls, or teeth; we should have to crawl like worms, and to live on some pap-like food.
It seems very extraordinary, but if anyone works it out he will see that, if the body had to get on without its two pounds of common lime, there would be no machinery, ships, or railways, no guns and swords, no houses and cities, and human life would entirely consist of crawling out of some hole in the ground at sunrise, chewing berries and leaves, and crawling under the earth again at night.
Therefore, it is impossible to single out any element and say, "This is the most important element of the body." For not only the two pounds of lime, but the pound and a half of phosphorus, and the far less quantity of iron, are as essential as the 106 lbs. of oxygen.
What is most curious about phosphorus is that, being a powerful and terrible poison, the body can contain such a lot of it without suffering injury. Sufficient is scattered among the bones, the flesh, the nervous system, and the various organs to kill off a whole village, or to supply it with all the matches it requires. For the body contains sufficient phosphorus to make 8,064 boxes of matches containing 60 matches each.
What phosphorus does for the bones is plain enough. With calcium and oxygen it forms the exceedingly hard phosphate of calcium that gives the bones their rigidity.
No one appears to be perfectly sure what part it plays in the other tissues of the body. Something very forcible, certainly, for whenever sufficient is not present we grow listless; and nothing tones up the system, in some states of low health, like a course of phosphorus medication. If phosphorus is not precisely, as many people suppose, the element that gives man his intellectual power, it is absolutely essential to a high degree of nervous efficiency.
THE BODY IS A SOAP FACTORY, AND GENERALLY CONTAINS MATTER SUFFICIENT FOR A CAKE THIS SIZE.