Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 by Various

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A small proportion of sulphur is found in flesh and blood. We prove its
presence in the egg by common experience. An egg--from which it escapes
more easily than from flesh--discovers its presence by blackening
silver, as every housekeeper knows, whose social position is too high
for bone egg-spoons or too low for gold ones. This passion which sulphur
entertains for silver is very strong, as every one knows who has ever
been under that wholesome discipline which had its weekly recurrence at
the delightful institution of Dotheboy's Hall; and what Anglo-Saxon ever
grew up, innocent of that delectable vernal medicine to which we refer?
Has he not found all the silver change in his pocket grow black,
suggesting very unpleasant suspicions of bogus coin? The sulphur, being
more than is wanted in the economy of the system, has made its escape
through every pore in his skin, and, of course, fraternizes with the
silver on its way. But it was of the sulphur which is natural to the
body and always found there that we were speaking. When the animal
dies, and the vital forces give way to chemical affinities, when the
phosphorus and the rest take their departure, the sulphur, too, finds
itself occupation in new fields of duty.

Chlorine and sodium, two more of the elements of animal structures,
produce, in combination, common salt,--without which our food would be
so insipid, that we have the best evidence of its being a necessary
article of diet. The body has many uses for salt. It is found in the
tears, as we are informed by poets, who talk of "briny drops" and "saut,
saut tears"; though why there, unless to keep the lachrymal fluid from
spoiling, in those persons who bottle up their tears for a long time, we
cannot divine.

Perhaps we had better take the rest into consideration together,--the
magnesia and iron, and whatever other elements are found in the body.
Though some of them are there in minute quantities, the structure cannot
exist without them,--and for their constant and sufficient supply our
food must provide.

To see what becomes of all these materials after we have done with them,
we must extend our inquiries among the articles of ordinary diet and
ascertain from what sources we derive the several elements.

It has been sometimes believed that none but animal food contains all
the elements required for the support of life. Thanks to Liebig, we have
discovered that vegetable substances also, fruits, grains, and
roots, contain them all, and, in most cases, in very nearly the same
proportions as they are found in animals. We are not lecturing on
dietetics; therefore we will not pause to explain why, although either
bread or meat alone contains the various materials for flesh and bone,
it is better to combine them than to endeavor to subsist on one only.

Whither, then, go these elements when man has done with them? The answer
is,--All Nature wants them. Every plant is ready to drink them up, as
soon as they have taken forms which bring them within its reach. As
gases, they are inhaled by the leaves, or, dissolved in water, they
are drunk up by the roots. All plants have not the same appetites, and
therefore they can make an amicable division of the supply. Grasses and
grains want a large proportion of phosphate of lime, which they convert
into husks. Peas and beans have little use for nitrogen, and resign it
to others. Cabbages, cauliflowers, turnips, and celery appropriate a
large share of the sulphur.

The food of plants and that of animals have this great difference:
plants take their nourishment in inorganic form only; animals require
to have their food in organic form. That is, all the various
minerals, singly or combined, which compose the tissues of plants and
animals,--carbon, hydrogen, phosphorus, and the rest, which we have
already named,--are taken up by plants in mineral form alone. The food
of animals, on the other hand, consists always of organized forms. There
is no artificial process by which oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen can be
brought into a form suitable for the nourishment of animals. As oxygen,
carbon, and hydrogen, they are not food, will not sustain our life,
and human art cannot imitate their nutritious combinations. Artificial
fibrine and gluten (organic principles) transcend our power of
contrivance as far as the philosopher's stone eluded the grasp of the
alchemists. We know exactly how many equivalents of oxygen, hydrogen,
carbon, and nitrogen enter into the composition of each of the animal
elements; but we can no more imitate an organic element than we can form
a leaf. What we cannot do the vegetable world does for us. Thus we see
why it was necessary that the earth should be clothed with vegetation
before animals could be introduced. A field-mouse dies and decays, and
its elements are appropriated by the roots around its grave; and we
can easily imagine the next generations of mice, the children and
grandchildren of the deceased rodent, feasting off the tender bark which
was made out of the remains of their parent. The soil of our gardens and
the atmosphere above it are full of potential tomatoes, beans, corn,
potatoes, and cabbages,--even of peaches of the finest flavor, and
grapes whose aroma is transporting.

Plants, as well as animals, have their peculiar tastes. Cut off the
supply of phosphate of lime from a field of corn, and it will not grow.
You can easily do this by planting the same land with corn for three
or four successive years, and your crop will dwindle away to nothing,
unless you supply the ground every year with as much of the mineral as
the corn takes away from it. All plants have the power of selecting from
the soil the materials necessary to their growth; and if they do not
find them in the soil, they will not grow. It is now a familiar fact,
that, when an old forest of deciduous trees has been felled, evergreens
will spring up in their places. The old oaks, hickories, and beeches,
as any observer would discover, pass their last years in repose, simply
putting out their leaves and bearing a little fruit every year, but
making hardly any new wood. An oak may attain to nearly its full size,
in spread of branches, in its first two hundred years, and live for five
or six hundred years longer in a state of comparative rest. It seems to
grow no more, simply because it has exhausted too much of the material
for its nourishment from the ground around its roots. At least, we know,
that, when we have cut it down, not oaks, but pines, will germinate
in the same soil,--pines, which, having other necessities and taking
somewhat different food, find a supply in the ground, untouched by
their predecessor. Hence the rotation of crops, so much talked of by
agriculturists. Before the subject was so well understood, the ground
was allowed to lie fallow for a year or two, when the crops began to
grow small, that it might recover from the air the elements it had lost.
We now adopt the principle of rotation, and plant beans this year where
last year we put corn.

It is not merely that plants deprive themselves of their future support
by exhausting the neighboring earth of the elements they require. Some
of them put into the ground substances which are poisonous to themselves
or other plants. Thus, beans and peas pour out from their roots a very
notable amount of a certain gum which is not at all suited to their
own nourishment,--so that, if we plant beans in the same spot several
successive seasons, they thrive very poorly. But this gum appears to be
exactly the food for corn; if, therefore, we raise crops of beans and
corn alternately, they assist each other. Liebig gives the results of a
series of experiments illustrating the reciprocal actions of different
species of plants. Various seeds were sprouted in water, in order to
observe the nature of the excretions from their roots. It was found
"that the water in which plants of the family of the _Leguminosae_
(beans and peas) grew acquired a brown color, from the substance which
exuded from their roots. Plants of the same species, placed in water
impregnated with these excrements, were impeded in their growth, and
faded prematurely; whilst, on the contrary, corn-plants grew vigorously
in it, and the color of the water diminished sensibly, so that it
appeared as if a certain quantity of the excrements of the _Leguminosae_
had really been absorbed by the corn-plants." The oak, which is the
great laboratory of tannin, not only lays up stores of it in its bark
and leaves, but its roots discharge into the ground enough of it to tan
the rootlets of all plants that venture to put down their suction-hose
into the same region, and their spongioles are so effectually closed
by this process, that they can no longer perform their office, and the
plant that bears them dies. Plants whose roots ramify among the roots
of poppies become unwilling opium-eaters, from the exudation of this
narcotic principle into the ground, and are stunted, like the children
of Gin Lane.

The Aquarium furnishes a very interesting example of the mutual
dependence of the three natural kingdoms. Here, in a box holding a few
gallons of water and a little atmospheric air, is a miniature world,
secluded, and supplying its own wants. Its success depends on the number
and character of the animals and plants being so adapted as to secure
just the requisite amount of active growth to each to sustain the life
of the other: that the plants should be sufficient to support, by the
superfluities of their growth, the vegetarians among the animated tribes
that surround them; and that all the animal tribes of the aquarium,
whether subsisting upon the vegetables or on their smaller and weaker
fellow-creatures, should restore to the water in excrements the mineral
substances which will enable the plants to make good the daily loss
occasioned by the depredations of the sea-rovers that live upon them.
Thus an aquarium, its constituents once correctly adjusted, has all the
requisites for perpetuity; or rather, the only obstacle to its unlimited
continuance is, that it is a mortal, and not a Divine hand, that
controls its light and heat.

In the examination of the materials appropriated by plants from the
soil, we find that mineral substances are sometimes taken up in solution
in larger amount than the growth of the plant and the maturation of its
fruit require, and the excess is deposited again, in crystalline form
in the substance of the plant. If we cut across a stalk of the
garden rhubarb, we can see, with the aid of a microscope, the fine
needle-shaped crystals of oxalate of potash lying among the fibres of
the plant,--a provision for an extra supply of the oxalic acid which is
the source of the intense sourness of this vegetable. When the sap of
the sugar-maple is boiled down to the consistence of syrup and allowed
to stand, it sometimes deposits a considerable amount of sand; indeed,
this is probably always present in some degree, and justifies, perhaps,
the occasional complaint of the grittiness of maple-sugar. But it is a
native grit, and not chargeable upon the sugar-makers. It is nothing
less than flint, which the roots of the maple absorbed, while it was
dissolved in water in the soil. The sap, still holding the flint in
solution, flows out, clear as water, when the tree is tapped; but when
it is concentrated by boiling, the silicious mineral is deposited in
little crystals, so that the bottom of the pan appears to be covered
with sand. We could not select a more interesting example of the very
wide diffusion of some compound substances than this one of silicic
acid. It is found in the mineral and vegetable kingdoms. Being a
mineral, it cannot be appropriated to animal uses, without being
decomposed and transformed into an organic condition; but in the
numerous species of plants whose stalks require stiffening against
the winds,--in the grasses and canes, including all our grains, the
sugar-cane, and the bamboo,--a silicate (an actual flint) is taken up by
the roots and stored away in the stalks as a stiffener. The rough, sharp
edge of a blade of grass sometimes makes an ugly cut on one's finger by
means of the flint it contains. Silex is the chief ingredient in quartz
rock, which is so widely diffused over the earth, and enters into the
composition of most of the precious stones. The ruby, the emerald, the
topaz, the amethyst, chalcedony, carnelian, jasper, agate, and garnet,
and all the beautiful varieties of rock crystal, are mostly or entirely
silex. Glass is a compound of silex and pearlash. One who is curious in
such things may make glass out of a straw, by burning it and heating the
ashes with a blowpipe. A little globule of pure glass will form as the
ashes are consumed. The following curious instance, quoted by that
interesting physiologist, Dr. Carpenter, shows the same effect upon a
large scale. A melted mass of glassy substance was found on a meadow
between Mannheim and Heidelberg, in Germany, after a thunder-storm. It
was, at first, supposed to be a meteor; but, when chemically examined,
it proved to consist of silex, combined with potash,--in the form
in which it exists in grasses; and, upon further inquiry, it was
ascertained that a stack of hay had stood upon the spot, of which
nothing remained but the ashes, the whole having been ignited by the
lightning.

There is nothing in Nature more striking to the novice than the first
suggestions of the various, and apparently contradictory, at least
unexpected, positions in which the same mineral is found. Now carbon is
one of the minerals whose exchanges are peculiarly interesting. Chemists
say that the diamond is the only instance in Nature of pure carbon:
it burns in oxygen under the influence of intense heat, and leaves no
ashes. Next to this--strange gradation!--is charcoal, which comes within
a very little of being a diamond. But just that little interval is
apparently so great, that none but a chemist would suspect there was
any relationship between them. Then come all those immense beds of coal
which compose one of the geological strata of the earth's crust, a
stratum that was formed before the appearance of the animated creation,
when the earth was clothed with a gigantic forest, whose mighty trunks
buried themselves with their fallen leaves, and became, in time, a
continuous bed of carbonaceous stone.

If we look at the vegetable and animal kingdoms, we find carbon entering
into the composition of every tissue. But there are certain tissues and
anatomical elements (as physicians say) which are formed largely of
carbon and have no nitrogen whatever. These are oils and fats and
everything related to them. What will be chiefly interesting, however,
to our readers, is the power of transformation of one of these
substances into another. Starch, gum, and sugar can all be changed into
fat. The explanation of it is in the fact, that these substances are all
chemically alike,--that is, they all have nearly the same proportions of
carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen, and no nitrogen; but by slight differences
in the combination of these elements, they exist in Nature as so many
distinct substances. Their approach to identity is further confirmed
by the fact, that starch can be made into gum, and either of them into
sugar, in the laboratory. The transformation of starch and gum into
sugar is also constantly going on in the ripening of fruits. When
country-dames make currant-jellies and currant-wine, they know very
well, that, if they allow the berries to get dead-ripe, their jelly will
not be so firm as when they seize an early opportunity and gather them
when first fully red. They may also have observed that jelly made late,
besides being less firm, is much more likely to candy. At first, the
currants contain hardly any sugar, but more gum and vegetable jelly
(glue); when dead-ripe, they have twelve times as much sugar as at
first, and the gum and glue are much diminished. The gummy and gluey
materials have been transformed into sugar. Every ripe fruit gives us
evidence of the same manufacture of sugar that has gone on under the
stimulus of the sun's rays; and in the greatest source of sugar, the
cane, the process is the same. A French physician, M. Bernard, has,
within the last twelve years, discovered that the liver of animals is
constantly making sugar out of all kinds of food, while the lungs are
all the time undoing the work of the liver and turning it back into its
chemical elements. And although, in the laboratory of the liver, it is
discovered that no alimentary substance is quite deficient in sweetness,
yet there, as elsewhere, starch and gum yield a far greater amount of it
than animal substances.

We have stated that starch and gum can be turned into sugar by art,--but
as no chemist has yet succeeded in imitating an animal substance, the
change of these three into fat takes place only in the body. There
are proofs enough within general observation, that one object of this
portion of our diet is the supply of fat. The Esquimaux fattens on his
diet of blubber and train-oil; the slaves on the sugar-plantations grow
fat in the boiling-season, when they live heartily on sugar; the Chinese
grow fat on an exclusively rice diet,--and rice is chiefly starch. But
one of the most interesting observations of the transformation of sugar
into a fat is that made by Huber upon bees. It was the discovery, that
bees make their wax out of honey, and not of pollen, as was formerly
believed. When Huber shut up some bees in a close hive, and kept them
supplied with pure honey or with sugar alone, they subsisted upon it,
and soon began to build the comb. Wax is a fat, and the honey which is
eaten by the bee is partly transformed into wax in his body. In about
twenty-four hours after his stomach has been filled with honey, thin
plates of wax appear on the scales of his abdomen, having oozed through
eight little openings in the scales and there hardened. Of this they
build their cells.

We have wandered far from the consideration of the propensity of certain
species of plants to take up special compound substances from the
earth; but the wide-spread silex, with which we set out, displayed so
interesting a field of observation, that it could not be resisted, and
encouraged a disposition to rove, which has been to us instructive and
entertaining. To return to plants,--we find they make use of compounds
for certain special ends; but, as we have seen, the whole vegetable
kingdom uses the eight or ten primitive elements which it has in common
with the animals, and out of these alone forms the infinite variety of
products which we derive from it for food and various economical
and aesthetical purposes. Among the many processes of Nature whose
contemplation fills us with ever new delight, this power of the
adaptation of a few means to an infinite number of ends is one of the
most enchanting. We endeavor to explain by chemical laws the reduction
of the materials which earth and air furnish, to a form in which they
can be appropriated by the tree; by endosmose and exosmose we think we
have overcome the obstacles to a clear comprehension of the circulation
of the sap; and by a cell-theory we believe we have explained the whole
growth of wood and leaves and fruit. But what microscope or what alembic
shall ever tell us why a collection of tubes and cells in one tree
creates the most wholesome and delicious fruit, while in another an
organization precisely similar, so far as we can discern, produces only
harsh and poisonous berries? why the acacia tribe elaborate their gum,
the pine family turpentine, the almond prussic acid, the sorrels oxalic
acid? why the tall calisaya-tree of the Andes deposits in its bark the
valuable medicine cinchona, and the oak, the hemlock, the tea-plant, and
many others, make use of similar repositories to lay up stores of
tannic acid? The numberless combinations of the same materials, and
the wonderful power which rests in a single seed to bring about with
unvarying uniformity its own distinct result, attest to us every day the
admirable wisdom and goodness of the Creator.

These regular, every-day transformations of material elements from rock
to tree, from tree to man, and back through a continual circuit, would
repay us for spending our leisure hours in studying it, with our own
eyes as well as with the eyes of others. The glance we have given is
sufficiently suggestive to turn the attention of our readers that way.
Before parting with them, however, we wish to make a few excursions
into the natural world, to follow out some of the more peculiar and
unexpected migrations of material atoms. Suppose we take a little
marble,--which, in chemical constitution, is carbonate of lime,--that
very marble, for instance, which forms the palaces of Venice, against
which the waters of the Mediterranean have dashed for so many centuries,
and have not dashed in vain. In their perpetual washing, they have worn
away the stone and carried off its particles,--an insignificant amount,
it is true, but, little as it is, it has not remained unused. For
that very carbonate of lime, which once shared the proud state of the
"glorious city in the sea," now helps to form the coarse shells of
oysters, or is embodied in the vast coral reefs that shoot out from the
islands of the West Indies, or is deposited year after year by dying
shell-fish, which are slowly carpeting the ocean-bed with their remains.
Much of this same Venice marble has doubtless been appropriated by
fishes from the sea-water which dissolved it, been transformed into
their bones, cast upon the soil of Italy, disintegrated, and imbibed by
the thirsty roots of forests in sight of the very walls from which it
parted. And who can say that parts of it do not now adorn the necks of
some Venetian dames, in coral, or more costly pearls? What says Ariel to
the orphaned Ferdinand?

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

This is but a hint of the mutability of created things. Marble,
sea-shells, the chalk-cliffs of Dover, the limestone fossils which
preserve for us animal forms of species long since extinct, the coral
formations that are stretching out in dangerous reefs in so many seas
of the tropics, are all identical in their chief ingredient, and, as
we see, are by natural processes and various accidents constantly
interchanging their positions.

It ought to be consoling to those who think a great deal of their
bodies, to reflect, that, if we may tend "to base uses," we may also
tend to very noble ones. In the course of their transmigrations, the
elements of a worthless individual may get into far better company than
they have before enjoyed,--may enter into brains that immortalize their
owner and redeem the errors of the old possessor. Whoever bases his
merit on a long line of ancestors who have nothing but a perpetuated
name to boast of, may be likened to the last of many successive tenants
of a house who have hired it for their temporary uses. The inheritance
of a brave spirit and a noble mind is a sufficient justification for a
reasonable pride; but not so with the heritage of materials which are
continually interchanging with the clod.

There need be nothing humiliating in such thoughts; the operations
of Nature are always admirable. But when the relics of humanity are
deliberately appropriated to such mechanical or scientific purposes
as we shall relate, before they have entirely lost their original (we
should say latest) form, then most men would look upon the act as
in some sort a desecration. With what holy horror would the ancient
Egyptians regard the economical uses to which their embalmed bodies were
appropriated a few centuries ago! In the words of Ambrose Pare, the
great surgeon of five French kings in the sixteenth century, is a full
account of the preparation and administration of "mummie,"--that is,
Egyptian mummies, powdered and made into pills and potions,--"to such
as have falne from high places or have beene otherwise bruised." The
learned physician enters his protest against the use of it, (which he
says is almost universal with the faculty,) as quite inefficacious and
disgusting. His disgust, however, arises principally from the fact that
the "mummie" prepared by the apothecaries must have been derived "from
the carcases of the basest people of Egypt; for the nobelmen and cheefe
of the province, so religiously addicted to the monuments of their
ancestors, would never suffer the bodyes of their friends and kindred to
be transported hither for filthy gaine and detested use."

If such traffic be base, what shall we say of some priests of Nicaragua,
who renovate their burial-grounds by exhuming the bones of the dead,
with the earth that surrounds them, and selling the mass to the
manufacturers of nitre? No sentiment of reverence for the sepulchres
of their fathers incites them to resist the inroads of foreign
pirates,--for they manufacture their fathers' bones into gunpowder.

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