The History of a Mouthful of Bread | Page 5

all ways, to the frog, with its large goggle eyes and clammy body, hiding itself in the water as soon as you come near it. But again, the frog, which can come and go as it likes, is decidedly superior to the oyster, which has neither head nor limbs, and lives all alone, glued into a shell, in a sort of perpetual imprisonment.
Now the machine I have been telling you about is found in the oyster and in the frog as well as in the dog, only it is less complicated, and therefore less perfect in the oyster than in the frog; and less perfect again in the frog than in the dog; for as we descend in the scale of animals we find it becoming less and less elaborate--losing here one of its parts, there another, but nevertheless remaining still the same machine to all intents and purposes; though by the time it has reached its lowest condition of structure we should hardly be able to recognize it again, if we had not watched it through all its gradations of form, and escorted it, as it were, from stage to stage.
Let me make this clear to you by a comparison.
You know the lamp which is lit every evening on the drawing-room table, and around which you all assemble to work or read. Take off first the shade, which throws the light on your book--then the glass which prevents it smoking--then the little chimney which holds the wick and drives the air into the flame to make it burn brightly. Then take away the screw, which sends the wick up and down; undo the pieces one by one, until none remain but those absolutely necessary to having a light at all--namely, the receptacle for the oil and the floating wick which consumes it.
Now if any one should come in and hear you say, "Look at my lamp," what would he reply? He would most likely ask at once, "What lamp?"--for there would be very little resemblance to a lamp in that mere ghost of one before him.
But to you, who have seen the different parts removed one after another, that wick soaked in oil (let your friend shake his head about it as he pleases) will still be the lamp to you, however divested of much that made it once so perfect, and however dimly it may shine in consequence.
And this is exactly what happens when the machine we are discussing is examined in the different grades of animals. The ignoramus who has not followed it through its changes and reductions cannot recognize it when it is presented to him in its lowest condition; but any one who has carefully observed it throughout, knows that it is, in point of fact, the same machine still.
This, then, is what we are now going to look at together, my dear little girl. We will study first, piece by piece, the exquisite machine within ourselves, which is of such unceasing use to us as long as we do not give it more than a proper share of work to perform. Do you understand? We will see what becomes of the mouthful of bread which you place so coolly between your teeth, as if when that was done nothing further remained to be thought about. We will trace it in its passage through every part of the machine, from beginning to end. It will therefore be simply only the History of a Mouthful of Bread I am telling you, even while I seem to be talking of other matters; for to make that comprehensible I shall have to enter into a good many explanations.
And when you have thoroughly got to understand the history of what you eat yourself, we will look a little into the history of what other animals eat, beginning by those most like ourselves, and going on to the rest in regular succession downwards. And while we are on the subject, I will say a word or two on the way in which vegetables eat, for, as you remember, I have stated that they do eat also.
Do you think this is likely to interest you, and be worth the trouble of some thought and attention?
Perhaps you may tell me it sounds very tedious, and like making a great fuss about a trifle; that you have all your life eaten mouthfuls of bread without troubling yourself as to what became of them, and yet have not been stopped growing by your ignorance, any more than the little cat, who knows no more how it happens than you do.
True, my dear; but the cat is only a little cat, and you are a little girl. Up to the present moment you and she have known, one as much as the other on this