The Faber Book of Science (11 page)

‘
The environment creates the organ
’

On arriving in Paris in 1821 with my fellow-student Alphonse Robert, I gave myself up wholly to studying for the career which had been thrust upon me, and loyally kept the promise I had given my father on leaving. It was soon put to a somewhat severe test when Robert, having announced one morning that he had bought a ‘subject’ (a corpse), took me for the first time to the dissecting-room at the Hospice de la Pitié. At the sight of that terrible charnel-house – the fragments of limbs, the grinning faces and gaping skulls, the bloody quagmire underfoot and the atrocious smell it gave off, the swarms of sparrows wrangling over scraps of lung, the rats in their corner gnawing the bleeding vertebrae – such a feeling of revulsion possessed me that I leapt through the window of the dissecting-room and fled for home as though Death and all his hideous train were at my heels. The shock of that first impression lasted for twenty-four hours. I did not want to hear another word about anatomy, dissection or medicine, and I meditated a hundred mad schemes of escape from the future that hung over me.

Robert lavished his eloquence in a vain attempt to argue away my disgust and demonstrate the absurdity of my plans. In the end he got me to agree to make another effort. For the second time I accompanied him to the hospital and we entered the house of the dead. How strange! The objects which before had filled me with extreme horror had absolutely no effect upon me now. I felt nothing but a cold distaste; I was already as hardened to the scene as any seasoned medical student. The crisis was past. I found I actually enjoyed groping about in a poor fellow’s chest and feeding the winged inhabitants of the delightful place their ration of lung. ‘Hallo!’ Robert cried,
laughing, ‘you’re getting civilized. “Thou giv’st the little birds their daily bread.”’ ‘“An o’er all nature’s realm my bounty spread,”’ I retorted, tossing a shoulder-blade to a great rat staring at me with famished eyes.

The charge, consisting of powder and duck shot, was received in the left side of the youth, he being at a distance of not more than one yard from the muzzle of the gun. The contents entered posteriorly, and in an oblique direction, forward and inward, literally blowing off
integuments
and muscles of the size of a man’s hand, fracturing and carrying away the anterior half of the sixth rib, fracturing the fifth, lacerating the lower portion of the left lobe of the lungs, the diaphragm, and perforating the stomach.

The whole mass of materials forced from the musket, together with fragments of clothing and pieces of fractured ribs, were driven into the muscles and cavity of the chest.

I saw him in twenty-five or thirty minutes after the accident occurred, and, on examination, found a portion of the lung, as large as a Turkey’s egg, protruding through the external wound, lacerated and burnt; and immediately below this, another protrusion, which, on further examination, proved to be a portion of the stomach, lacerated through all its coats, and pouring out the food he had taken for his breakfast, through an orifice large enough to admit the fore finger.

In attempting to return the protruded portion of the lung, I was prevented by a sharp point of the fractured rib, over which it had caught by its membranes; but by raising it with my finger, and clipping off the point of the rib, I was able to return it into its proper cavity, though it could not be retained there, on account of the incessant efforts to cough.

The projecting portion of the stomach was nearly as large as that of the lung. It passed through the lacerated diaphragm and external
wound, mingling the food with the bloody mucus blown from the lungs.

I had opportunities for the examination of the interior of the stomach, and its secretions, which has never before been so fully offered to any one. This most important organ, its secretions and its operations, have been submitted to my observation in a very extraordinary manner, in a state of perfect health, and for years in succession.

At 12 o’clock I introduced through the perforation, into the stomach, the following articles of diet, suspended by a silk string, and fastened at proper distances, so as to pass in without pain – viz.: – a piece of high seasoned
a
la
mode
beef;
a piece of
raw,
salted,
fat
pork;
a piece of
raw,
salted,
lean
beef;
a piece of
boiled,
salted
beef;
a piece of
stale
bread;
and a bunch of
raw,
sliced
cabbage;
each piece weighing about two drachms; the lad continuing his usual employment about the house.

At 1 o’clock, p.m., withdrew and examined them – found the
cabbage
and
bread
about half digested: the pieces of
meat
unchanged. Returned them into the stomach.

At 2 o’clock, p.m., withdrew them again – found the
cabbage,
bread,
pork,
and
boiled
beef,
all cleanly digested, and gone from the
string; the other pieces of meat but very little affected. Returned them into the stomach again.

The usual method of extracting the gastric juice, for experiment, is by placing the subject on his right side, depressing the valve within the aperture, introducing a gum-elastic tube, of the size of a large quill, five or six inches into the stomach, and then turning him on the left side, until the orifice becomes dependent. In health, and when free from food, the stomach is
usually
entirely empty, and contracted upon itself. On introducing the tube, the fluid soon begins to flow, first by drops, then in an interrupted, and sometimes in a short continuous stream. Moving the tube about, up and down, or backwards and forwards, increases the discharge. The quantity of fluid ordinarily obtained is from four drachms to one and a half or two ounces, varying with the circumstances and condition of the stomach. Its extraction is generally attended by that peculiar sensation at the pit of the stomach, termed sinking, with some degree of faintness, which renders it necessary to stop the operation. The usual time of extracting the juice is early in the morning, before he has eaten, when the stomach is empty and clean.

I think I am warranted, from the result of all the experiments, in saying, that the gastric juice, so far from being ‘inert as water,’ as some authors assert, is the most general solvent in nature, of alimentary matter – even the hardest bone cannot withstand its action. It is capable,
even
out
of
the
stomach,
of effecting perfect digestion, with the aid of due and uniform degrees of heat (100° Fahrenheit), and gentle agitation … We must, I think, regard this fluid as a chemical agent, and its operation as a chemical action. It is certainly every way analogous to it; and I can see no more objection to accounting for the change effected on the food, on the supposition of a chemical process, than I do in accounting for the various and diversified modifications of matter, which are operated on in the same way. The decay of the dead body is a chemical operation, separating it into its elementary principles – and why not the solution of aliment in the stomach …

Pure gastric juice, when taken directly out of the stomach of a healthy adult, unmixed with any other fluid, save a portion of the mucus of the stomach, with which it is most commonly, and perhaps always combined, is a clear, transparent fluid; inodorous; a little saltish; and very perceptibly acid. Its taste, when applied to the tongue, is similar to thin mucilaginous water, slightly acidulated with muriatic acid. It is readily diffusible in water, wine or spirits; slightly effervesces with alkalis; and is an effectual solvent of the
materia
alimentaria
[food]. It possesses the property of coagulating albumen, in an eminent degree; is powerfully antiseptic, checking the putrefaction of meat; and effectually restorative of healthy action, when applied to old, fœtid sores, and foul, ulcerating surfaces.

We know that one earthquake may raise the coast of Chile for a hundred miles to an average height of about five feet. A repetition of two thousand shocks of equal violence might produce a mountain chain one hundred miles long and ten thousand feet high. Now should … one of these conclusions happen in a century, it would be consistent with the order of events experienced by the Chileans from the earliest times.

There is scarcely any land hitherto examined in Europe, North Asia, or North America, which has not been raised from the bosom of the deep, since the origins of the carboniferous rocks … If we were to submerge again all the marine strata [i.e. rock layers containing underwater remains], from the transition limestone to the most recent shelly beds, the summits of some primary mountains would alone remain above the waters.

However constant we believe the relative proportion of sea and land to continue, we know that there is annually some small variation in their respective geographical positions, and that in every century the land is in some parts raised, and in others depressed by earthquakes, and so likewise is the bed of the sea. By these and other ceaseless changes, the configuration of the earth's surface has been remodelled again and again since it was the habitation of organic beings, and the bed of the ocean has been lifted up to the height of some of the loftiest mountains. The imagination is apt to take alarm, when called upon to admit the formation of such irregularities of the crust of the earth, after it had become the habitation of living creatures; but if time be allowed, the operation need not subvert the ordinary repose of nature, and the result is insignificant, if we consider how slightly the highest mountain chains cause our globe to differ from a perfect sphere. Chimborazo [a mountain in Ecuador], although it rises to more than 21,000 feet above the surface of the sea, would only be represented on an artificial globe, of about six feet in diameter, by a grain of sand less than one-twentieth of an inch in thickness. The superficial inequalities of the earth, then, may be deemed minute in quantity, and their distribution at any particular epoch must be regarded in geology as temporary peculiarities.

One of the most extraordinary statements is that of Major Rennell, in his excellent paper on the Delta of the Ganges. ‘A glass of water', he says, ‘taken out of the river when at its height, yields about one part in four of mud. No wonder, then, that the subsiding waters should quickly form a stratum of earth, or that the delta should encroach on the sea!' The same hydrographer computed with much care the number of cubic feet of water discharged by the Ganges into the sea, and estimated the mean quantity through the whole year to be eighty thousand cubic feet in a second. When the river is most swollen, and its velocity much accelerated, the quantity is four hundred and five thousand cubic feet in a second… We are somewhat staggered by the results to which we must arrive if we compare the proportion of mud, as given by Rennell, with his computation of the quantity of water discharged, which latter is probably very correct. If it were true that the Ganges, in the flood season, contained one part in four of mud, we should then be obliged to suppose that there passes down, every four days, a quantity of mud equal in volume to the water which is discharged in the course of twenty-four hours. If the mud be assumed to be equal to one-half the specific gravity of granite (it would, however, be more), the weight of matter
daily
carried down in the flood season, would be about equal to seventy-four times the weight of the Great Pyramid of Egypt. Even if it could be proved that the turbid waters of the Ganges contain one part
in
a
hundred
of mud, which is affirmed to be the case in regard to the Rhine, we should be brought to the extraordinary conclusion that there passes down, in every two days, into the Bay of Bengal, a mass about equal in weight and bulk to the Great Pyramid … We may confidently affirm that when the aggregate amount of solid matter transported by rivers in a given number of centuries from a large continent, shall be reduced to arithmetical computation, the result will appear most astonishing to those who are not in the habit of reflecting how many of the mightiest operations in nature are effected insensibly, without noise or disorder.

If we may be allowed so far to indulge the imagination, as to suppose a being entirely confined to the nether world – some ‘dusky melancholy sprite', like Umbriel [a gnome in Alexander Pope's poem
The
Rape
of
the
Lock
],
who could ‘flit on sooty pinions to the central earth', but who was never permitted to ‘sully the fair face of light' and emerge into the regions of water and air; and if this being should busy himself in investigating the structure of the globe, he might frame theories the exact converse of those adopted by human philosophers. He might infer that the stratified rocks, containing shells and other organic remains, were the oldest of created things, belonging to some original and nascent state of the planet. ‘Of these masses', he might say, ‘whether they consist of loose, incoherent sand, soft clay, or solid rock, none have been formed in modern times. Every year some parts of them are broken and shattered by earthquakes, or melted up by volcanic fire; and when they cool down slowly from a state of fusion, they assume a crystalline form perfectly distinct from those
inexplicable
rocks which are so regularly bedded, and contain stones full of curious impressions and fantastic markings. This process cannot have been carried on for an indefinite time, for in that case all the stratified rocks would ere this have been fused and crystallised. It is therefore probable that the whole planet once consisted of these
curiously-bedded
formations, at a time when the volcanic fire had not yet been brought into activity. Since that period there seems to have been a gradual development of heat, and this augmentation we may expect to continue till the whole globe shall be in a state of fluidity and incandescence.'

Such might be the system of the Gnome at the very same time that the followers of Leibnitz [1646–1716, a German philosopher], reasoning on what they saw on the outer surface, would be teaching the doctrine of gradual refrigeration, and averring that the earth had begun its career as a fiery comet, and would hereafter become an icy
mass … Man observes the annual decomposition of crystalline and igneous rocks, and may sometimes see their conversion into stratified deposits; but he cannot witness the reconversion of the sedimentary into the crystalline by subterranean fire. He is in the habit of regarding all the sedimentary rocks as more recent than the unstratified, for the same reason that we may suppose him to fall into the opposite error if he saw the origin of the igneous class only.

The entire thickness of these marls is unknown, but it certainly exceeds, in some places, 700 feet. They are for the most part either light-green or white, and usually calcareous. They are thinly foliated, a character which frequently arises from the innumerable thin plates or scales of that small animal called
cypris
,
a genus which comprises several species, of which some are recent, and may be seen swimming rapidly through the waters of our stagnant pools and ditches. This animal resides within two small valves like those of a bivalve shell, and it moults its integuments annually … Countless myriads of the shells of
cypris
were shed in the Eocene lakes, so as to give rise to divisions in the marl as thin as paper, and that too in stratified masses several hundred feet thick. A more convincing proof … of the slow and gradual process by which the lake was filled up with fine mud cannot be desired.

The existence of enormous seas of fresh water, such as the North American lakes, the largest of which is elevated more than six hundred feet above the level of the ocean, and is in parts twelve hundred feet deep, is alone sufficient to assure us, that the time will come, however
distant, when a deluge will lay waste a considerable part of the American continent … Notwithstanding, therefore, that we have not witnessed within the last three thousand years the devastation by deluge of a large continent, yet, as we may predict the future occurrence of such catastrophes, we are authorized to regard them as part of the present order of Nature.

Then might those genera of animals return, of which the memorials are preserved in the ancient rocks of our continents. The huge iguanodon might reappear in the woods, and the icthyosaur in the sea, while the pterodactyl might flit again through umbrageous groves of tree ferns. Coral reefs might be prolonged beyond the arctic circle, where the whale and the narwal now abound. Turtles might deposit eggs in the sand of the sea beach, where now the walrus sleeps, and where the seal is drifted on the ice-floe.

Millions of our race are now supported by lands situated where deep seas once prevailed in earlier ages. In many districts not yet occupied by man, land animals and forests now abound where the anchor once sank into the oozy bottom.