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LETTER XXIII.

ACTION OF THE BLOOD UPON THE ORGANS.

THE first time we talked about the Blood, my dear little pupil, I introduced him to you as the steward of your body, and what a steward to be sure! Always awake, as you may remember, always in motion; his pockets ever full of the materials unceasingly required by the indefatigable builders of that human cdifice in which it has pleased God to house your dear little self. If you wish really to understand what follows now, we must carry on the simile a little further.

A steward not only provides the workmen with materials, but gives them orders as well, and this is part of the blood's business also. He is not only commissarygeneral, but whipper-in of the whole household, and besides the care of giving out all the stores, has the charge to see that everything is properly done. The unhappy men who purchase prosperity at the dreadful cost of maintaining slavery, pretend that their slaves would do no work worth looking at, were there not always some one behind them with a whip in his hand. Well, our organs are slaves, and slaves of the worst sort. They would never do anything at all, if the blood were not everlastingly whipping them up in his ceaseless rounds. Let him come to a stand-still for one minute, for a second even, and everything stops short; then we are at once in the castle of the Sleeping Beauty in the wood.

But perhaps I cannot do better than to compare our bodily machine to a violin-to hit upon something less dismal than slaves-a violin with blood for its bow. As long as the bow runs over the strings the violin makes music and lives; when the bow stops, it is silent and dies.

You have never yet had a fainting fit, my dear child ; it rarely happens at your age. But you may possibly have seen somebody faint; or, at any rate, you have heard it talked about. Do you know what takes place in such cases? Now and then, in consequence of some violent emotion, but how or why I cannot tell you, all the blood rushes suddenly back towards the heart, as during an earthquake a river will sometimes flow back towards its source, leaving its bed dry. Thereupon the face turns white, as if to give notice that there is no longer anything red below the skin. The organs, no longer stimulated by the blood, leave off work altogether. The brain goes to sleep, the muscles relax, consciousness ceases, and you behold the poor body, from which the soul seems to have departed, give way on all sides, and fall to the ground like a corpse. This is not cxactly death, but it is yet an interruption of life. It would be death if nature did not get the upper hand again, and send back the deserter to his post.

I may remark here that it was partly on this account that some of the ancients thought the soul was seated in the blood; not a bad idea for people who were determined to pronounce where the soul was, when it is so easy to say one knows nothing about it. But those who placed it in the breath, and who have bequeathed to us those beautiful expressions-yielding up the last breath -giving up the ghost-were not wrong neither.

In point of fact the blood is not the soul of the body

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ACTION OF THE BLOOD UPON THE ORGANS.

in other words, does not keep the body alive, otherwise than by keeping up unceasingly and everywhere that magic fire of which we were talking last time.

The French people, in their picturesque language, have found an expression, full of energy, to express the action exercised by the master workman, who knows how to make his people work: "Il vous met le feu sous le ventre." This is, to the letter, the process employed by the blood to make the organs work. It makes a fire under the belly. Unhappily their work only lasts as long as the fire which causes the heat, and which is so necessary to life that it is almost confounded with it. It is the sacred fire of the Roman Vestals, which must be fed night and day under pain of death should it go out. Now, if to feed the sacred fire of life, it be necessary that the blood should everywhere find hydrogen and carbon unattached, that is to say, free and ready to unite themselves to oxygen, it is no less necessary that he should bring oxygen with him everywhere. Else there would be no marriage, and therefore no fire. Qxygen is, then, the talisman which brings the organs to obedience. Without oxygen he would be a slave driver without his whip; his orders would be despised. If the organs were to be deluged with venous blood— with that black blood which has lost its oxygen, they would not stir any more than if they had received so much water. They acknowledge nothing but arterial blood-red blood-blood rich in oxygen. That is what they respect, and which has authority over them; the other is a bankrupt who has lost his credit with his cash; those whom he fed but lately now laugh in his

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Literally, he puts fire under their bellies; but here signifying that he makes it so hot that the organs are compelled to continue in motion.

face. And as our good steward spends all his oxygen every time he goes his rounds, it would soon be over with him, and, consequently, with us, too, if he had not some method of replenishing his purse after each journey. Happily the lungs are the inexhaustible chest to which he always returns to renew his right of authority; that is, his power of preserving life. When it comes to the last sigh, the last effort of the diaphragm by which the chest is closed forever, we must bid adieu to life. In yielding up that, we have in very truth yielded up the ghost.

This is no joke, as you see, and it would not do to be caught unprepared, with an inexorable necessity hanging over one, which never allows a moment's respite. The blood acts like a reasonable being, therefore, in laying up his stores of combustible in reserve. Moreover, whether he has done so or not, the fire must go on all the same; that is absolutely necessary; and if he has no sparc fat to feed it with, when, from any cause, the stomach leaves off working, he makes use of anything he can lay his hands upon.

I know a story on this subject which will amuse you. There lived, in the reign of Francis I. of France, an honest countryman, of Périgord, named Bernard Palissy. At that time everybody could not afford to have earthenware plates, as they have now. It was a manufacture of which only the Italians had the secret, and Bernard, who knew something of the matter, from being a glassworker, took it into his head to try and find it out entirely by himself. So, without asking anybody's advice, he turned potter, built ovens, picked up wood as he could, manufactured his first pots, whether well or ill, made a beginning, and waited. He had fifteen or sixteen years of it before he succeeded; fifteen or six

198 ACTION OF THE BLOOD UPON THE ORGANS.

teen years of ruinous experiments, which would have discouraged a less sturdy heart than his. But he, after he had succeeded in picking up some money by his church windows, returned to his work with unconquerable perseverance, insensible to poverty, deaf to the ridicule of neighbors, and unmoved by the abuse of his wife, who was furious, as you may suppose, at being forced to play the heroine without having the least turn for it. And one fine day there was a grand uproar in La Chapelle-Biron (that was the name of his village). "Bernard Palissy has gone mad," said everybody; "he is burning up his house to bake his pots." And upon my word it was true! Wood happened to be wanting while a batch was in the oven, and Bernard having begun by using up the garden palisades, took next the large tables, and at last the floor of the house! What his wife had to say, I leave you to judge; as for him he listened to nothing; but, fixing his eyes on the insatiable furnace, threw in one thing after another, caring only for the risk to his handiwork. The ceiling would have followed the floor had not his pots been sufficiently baked without.

And thus, and thus, does the blood, when combustible matter fails him! He demolishes the house, and throws it, bit by bit, into the fire. The fat goes into it naturally enough, as I have already explained to you. It is the fuel-store of the house. It was put by on pur pose, and may be used up without injury. Then comes the turn of the muscles; more useful without being indispensable. Those are Bernard Palissy's palisades one may contrive to do without them. They melt away, so to speak, after a few days' fast, and you find yourself what people call "nothing but skin and bone." But then, if this condition is prolonged, and the exhausted

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