The Man With The Broken Ear | Page 8

a
rotifer: good night to him; somebody soaks him a little, and he wakes
up to bid you good day. All depends upon taking great care while he is
dry. You understand that if any one should merely break his head, no
drop of water, nor river, nor ocean could restore him.
"The marvellous thing is, that an animal which cannot live more than a
year, like the minute worm in grain-smut, can lie by twenty-four years
without dying, if one has taken the precaution of desiccating him.

"Needham collected a lot of them in 1743; he presented them to Martin
Folkes, who gave them to Baker, and these interesting creatures revived
in water in 1771. They enjoyed a rare satisfaction in elbowing their
own twenty-eighth generation. Wouldn't a man who should see his own
twenty-eighth generation be a happy grandfather?
"Another no less interesting fact is that desiccated animals have vastly
more tenacity of life than others. If the temperature were suddenly to
fall thirty degrees in this laboratory, we should all get inflammation of
the lungs. If it were to rise as much, there would be danger of
congestion of the brain. Well, a desiccated animal, which is not
absolutely dead, and which will revive to-morrow if I soak it, faces
with impunity, variations of ninety-five degrees and six-tenths. M.
Meiser and plenty of others have proved it.
"It remains to inquire, then, if a superior animal, a man for instance,
can be desiccated without any more disastrous consequences than a
little worm or a tardigrade. M. Meiser was convinced that it is
practicable; he wrote to that effect in all his books, although he did not
demonstrate it by experiment.
"Now where would be the harm in it, ladies? All men curious in regard
to the future, or dissatisfied with life, or out of sorts with their
contemporaries, could hold themselves in reserve for a better age, and
we should have no more suicides on account of misanthropy.
Valetudinarians, whom the ignorant science of the nineteenth century
declares incurable, needn't blow their brains out any more; they can
have themselves dried up and wait peaceably in a box until Medicine
shall have found a remedy for their disorders. Rejected lovers need no
longer throw themselves into the river; they can put themselves under
the receiver of an air pump, and make their appearance thirty years later,
young, handsome and triumphant, satirizing the age of their cruel
charmers, and paying them back scorn for scorn. Governments will
give up the unnatural and barbarous custom of guillotining dangerous
people. They will no longer shut them up in cramped cells at Mazas to
complete their brutishness; they will not send them to the Toulon
school to finish their criminal education; they will merely dry them up

in batches--one for ten years, another for forty, according to the gravity
of their deserts. A simple store-house will replace the prisons, police
lock-ups and jails. There will be no more escapes to fear, no more
prisoners to feed. An enormous quantity of dried beans and mouldy
potatoes will be saved for the consumption of the country.
"You have, ladies, a feeble delineation of the benefits which Doctor
Meiser hoped to pour upon Europe by introducing the desiccation of
man. He made his great experiment in 1813 on a French colonel--a
prisoner, I have been told, and condemned as a spy by court-martial.
Unhappily he did not succeed; for I bought the colonel and his box for
the price of an ordinary cavalry horse, in the dirtiest shop in Berlin."
CHAPTER IV.
THE VICTIM.
"My dear Leon," said M. Renault, "you remind me of a college
commencement. We have listened to your dissertation just as they
listen to the Latin discourse of the professor of rhetoric; there are
always in the audience a majority which learns nothing from it, and a
minority which understands nothing of it. But every body listens
patiently, on account of the sensations which are to come by and by. M.
Martout and I are acquainted with Meiser's works, and those of his
distinguished pupil, M. Pouchet; you have, then, said too much that is
in them, if you intended to speak for our benefit; and you have not said
enough that is in them for these ladies and gentlemen who know
nothing of the existing discussions regarding the vital and organic
principles.
"Is life a principle of action which animates the organs and puts them
into play? Is it not, on the contrary, merely the result of
organization--the play of various functions of organized matter? This is
a problem of the highest importance, which would interest the ladies
themselves, if one were to place it plainly before them. It would be
sufficient to say: 'We inquire whether there is a vital