The Man With The Broken Ear | Page 7

good mother mine,
the impression you experienced as a little girl, when some one first
showed you the inside of a watch in motion? You were satisfied that
there was a restless little animal inside the case, who worked
twenty-four hours a day at turning the hands. If the hands stopped

going, you said: 'It is because the little animal is dead.' Yet possibly he
was only asleep.
"It has since been explained to you that a watch contains an assemblage
of parts well fitted to each other and kept well oiled, which, being
wound, can be considered to move spontaneously in a perfect
correspondence. If a spring become broken, if a bit of the wheel work
be injured, or if a grain of sand insinuate itself between two of the parts,
the watch stops, and the children say rightly: 'The little animal is dead.'
But suppose a sound watch, well made, right in every particular, and
stopped because the machinery would not run from lack of oil; the little
animal is not dead; nothing but a little oil is needed to wake him up.
"Here is a first-rate chronometer, made in London. It runs fifteen days
without being wound. I gave it a turn of the key yesterday: it has, then,
thirteen days to run. If I throw it on the ground, or if I break the
main-spring, all is over. I will have killed the little animal. But suppose
that, without damaging anything, I find means to withdraw or dry up
the fine oil which now enables the parts to slip upon one another: will
the little animal be dead? No! It will be asleep. And the proof is that I
can lay my watch in a drawer, keep it there twenty-five years, and if,
after a quarter of a century, I put a drop of oil on it, the parts will begin
to move again. All that time would have passed without waking up the
little sleeping animal. It will still have thirteen days to go, after the time
when it starts again.
"All living beings, according to the opinion of Professor Meiser, are
watches, or organisms which move, breathe, nourish themselves, and
reproduce themselves as long as their organs are intact and properly
oiled. The oil of the watch is represented in the animal by an enormous
quantity of water. In man, for example, water provides about four-fifths
of the whole weight. Given--a colonel weighing a hundred and fifty
pounds, there are thirty pounds of colonel and a hundred and twenty
pounds, or about sixty quarts, of water. This is a fact proven by
numerous experiments. I say a colonel just as I would say a king; all
men are equal when submitted to analysis.
"Professor Meiser was satisfied, as are all physiologists, that to break a

colonel's head, or to make a hole in his heart, or to cut his spinal
column in two, is to kill the little animal; because the brain, the heart,
the spinal marrow are the indispensable springs, without which the
machine cannot go. But he thought too, that in removing sixty quarts of
water from a living person, one merely puts the little animal to sleep
without killing him--that a colonel carefully dried up, can remain
preserved a hundred years, and then return to life whenever any one
will replace in him the drop of oil, or rather the sixty quarts of water,
without which the human machine cannot begin moving again.
"This opinion, which may appear inadmissible to you and to me too,
but which is not absolutely rejected by our friend Doctor Martout, rests
upon a series of reliable observations which the merest tyro can verify
to-day. There are animals which can be resuscitated: nothing is more
certain or better proven. Herr Meiser, like the Abbé Spallanzani and
many others, collected from the gutter of his roof some little dried
worms which were brittle as glass, and restored life to them by soaking
them in water. The capacity of thus returning to life, is not the privilege
of a single species: its existence has been satisfactorily established in
numerous and various animals. The genus Volvox--the little worms or
wormlets in vinegar, mud, spoiled paste, or grain-smut; the Rotifera--a
kind of little shell-fish protected by a carapace, provided with a good
digestive apparatus, of separate sexes, having a nervous system with a
distinct brain, having either one or two eyes, according to the genus, a
crystalline lens, and an optic nerve; the Tardigrades--which are little
spiders with six or eight legs, separate sexes, regular digestive
apparatus, a mouth, two eyes, a very well defined nervous system, and
a very well developed muscular system;--all these die and revive ten or
fifteen times consecutively, at the will of the naturalist. One dries up