The Easiest Way in Housekeeping and Cooking Part 4

Hard-wood furniture, black walnut, or other varieties, requires oiling lightly with boiled linseed oil, and rubbing dry with a woolen cloth; and varnished furniture, mahogany or rosewood, if kept carefully dusted, requires only an occasional rubbing with chamois-skin or thick flannel to retain its polish perfectly. Soap should never be used on varnish of any sort.

Ingrain and other carpets, after shaking, are brightened in color by sprinkling a pound or two of salt over the surface, and sweeping carefully; and it is also useful to occasionally wipe off a carpet with borax-water, using a thick flannel, and taking care not to wet, but only dampen the carpet. Mirrors can be cleaned with whiting. Never scrub oil-pictures: simply wipe with a damp cloth, and, if picture-cord is used, wipe it off to secure against moths.

It is impossible to cover the whole ground of cleaning in this chapter.

Experience is the best teacher. Only remember that a household earthquake is not necessary, and that the whole work can be done so gradually, quietly, and systematically, that only the workers need know much about it. The sense of purity transfused through the air and breathing from every nook and corner should be the only indication that upheaval has existed. The best work is always in silence.

CHAPTER VII.

THE BODY AND ITS COMPOSITION.

"The lamp of life" is a very old metaphor for the mysterious principle vitalizing nerve and muscle; but no comparison could be so apt. The full-grown adult takes in each day, through lungs and mouth, about eight and a half pounds of dry food, water, and the air necessary for breathing purposes. Through the pores of the skin, the lungs, kidneys, and lower intestines, there is a corresponding waste; and both supply and waste amount in a year to one and a half tons, or three thousand pounds.

The steadiness and clear shining of the flame of a lamp depend upon quality, as well as amount of the oil supplied, and, too, the texture of the wick; and so all human life and work are equally made or marred by the food which sustains life, as well as the nature of the const.i.tution receiving that food.

Before the nature and quality of food can be considered, we must know the const.i.tuents of the body to be fed, and something of the process through which digestion and nutrition are accomplished.

I shall take for granted that you have a fairly plain idea of the stomach and its dependences. Physiologies can always be had, and for minute details they must be referred to. Bear in mind one or two main points: that all food pa.s.ses from the mouth to the stomach, an irregularly-shaped pouch or bag with an opening into the duodenum, and from thence into the larger intestine. From the mouth to the end of this intestine, the whole may be called the alimentary ca.n.a.l; a tube of varying size and some thirty-six feet in length. The mouth must be considered part of it, as it is in the mouth that digestion actually begins; all starchy foods depending upon the action of the saliva for genuine digestion, saliva having some strange power by which starch is converted into sugar.

Swallowed whole, or placed directly in the stomach, such food pa.s.ses through the body unchanged. Each division of the alimentary ca.n.a.l has its own distinct digestive juice, and I give them in the order in which they occur.

First, The saliva; secreted from the glands of the mouth:--alkaline, glairy, adhesive.

Second, The gastric juice; secreted in the inner or third lining of the stomach,--an acid, and powerful enough to dissolve all the fiber and alb.u.men of flesh food.

Third, The pancreatic juice; secreted by the pancreas, which you know in animals as sweetbreads. This juice has a peculiar influence upon fats, which remain unchanged by saliva and gastric juice; and not until dissolved by pancreatic juice, and made into what chemists call an _emulsion_, can they be absorbed into the system.

Fourth, The bile; which no physiologist as yet thoroughly understands. We know its action, but hardly _why_ it acts. It is a necessity, however; for if by disease the supply be cut off, an animal emaciates and soon dies.

Fifth, The intestinal juice; which has some properties like saliva, and is the last product of the digestive forces.

A meal, then, in its pa.s.sage downward is first diluted and increased in bulk by a watery fluid which prepares all the starchy portion for absorption. Then comes a still more profuse fluid, dissolving all the meaty part. Then the fat is attended to by the stream of pancreatic juice, and at the same time the bile pours upon it, doing its own work in its own mysterious way; and last of all, lest any process should have been imperfect, the long ca.n.a.l sends out a juice having some of the properties of all.

Thus each day's requirements call for

PINTS.

Of saliva 3-3/4 gastric juice 12 bile 3-3/4 pancreatic juice 1-1/2 intestinal juice 1/2 ------- 21-1/2

Do not fancy this is all wasted or lost. Very far from it: for the whole process seems to be a second circulation, as it were; and, while the blood is moving in its wonderful pa.s.sage through veins and arteries, another circulation as wonderful, an endless current going its unceasing round so long as life lasts, is also taking place. But without food the first would become impossible; and the quality of food, and its proper digestion, mean good or bad blood as the case may be. We must follow our mouthful of food, and see how this action takes place.

When the different juices have all done their work, the _chyme_, which is food as it pa.s.ses from the stomach into the duodenum or pa.s.sage to the lower stomach or bowels, becomes a milky substance called _chyle_, which moves slowly, pushed by numberless muscles along the bowel, which squeeze much of it into little glands at the back of the bowels. These are called the mesenteric glands; and, as each one receives its portion of chyle, a wonderful thing happens. About half of it is changed into small round bodies called corpuscles, and they float with the rest of the milky fluid through delicate pipes which take it to a sort of bag just in front of the spine. To this bag is fastened another pipe or tube--the thoracic duct--which follows the line of the spine; and up this tube the small bodies travel till they come to the neck and a spot where two veins meet.

A door in one opens, and the transformation is complete. The small bodies are raw food no more, but blood, traveling fast to where it may be purified, and begin its endless round in the best condition. For, as you know, venous blood is still impure and dirty blood. Before it can be really alive it must pa.s.s through the veins to the right side of the heart, flow through into the upper chamber, then through another door or valve into the lower, where it is pumped out into the lungs. If these lungs are, as they should be, full of pure air, each corpuscle is so charged with oxygen, that the last speck of impurity is burned up, and it goes dancing and bounding on its way. That is what health means: perfect food made into perfect blood, and giving that sense of strength and exhilaration that we none of us know half as much about as we should. We get it sometimes on mountain-tops in clear autumn days when the air is like wine; but G.o.d meant it to be our daily portion, and this very despised knowledge of cookery is to bring it about. If a lung is imperfect, supplied only with foul air as among the very poor, or diseased as in consumption, food does not nourish, and you now know why. We have found that the purest air and the purest water contain the largest proportion of oxygen; and it is this that vitalizes both food and, through food, the blood.

To nourish this body, then, demands many elements; and to study these has been the joint work of chemists and physiologists, till at last every const.i.tuent of the body is known and cla.s.sified. Many as these const.i.tuents are, they are all resolved into the simple elements, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon, while a little sulphur, a little phosphorus, lime, chlorine, sodium, &c., are added.

FLESH and BLOOD are composed of water, fat, fibrine, alb.u.men, gelatine, and the compounds of lime, phosphorus, soda, potash, magnesia, iron, &c.

BONE contains cartilage, gelatine, fat, and the salts of lime, magnesia, soda, &c., in combination with phosphoric and other acids.

CARTILAGE consists of chondrine, a substance somewhat like gelatine, and contains also the salts of sulphur, lime, soda, potash, phosphorus, magnesia, and iron.

BILE is made up of water, fat, resin, sugar, cholesterine, some fatty acids, and the salts of potash, iron, and soda.

THE BRAIN is made up of water, alb.u.men, fat, phosphoric acid, osmazone, and salts.

THE LIVER unites water, fat, and alb.u.men, with phosphoric and other acids, and lime, iron, soda, and potash.

THE LUNGS are formed of two substances: one like gelatine; another of the nature of caseine and alb.u.men, fibrine, cholesterine, iron, water, soda, and various fatty and organic acids.

How these varied elements are held together, even science with all its deep searchings has never told. No man, by whatsoever combination of elements, has ever made a living plant, much less a living animal. No better comparison has ever been given than that of Youmans, who makes a table of the a.n.a.logies between the human body and the steam-engine, which I give as it stands.

a.n.a.lOGIES OF THE STEAM-ENGINE AND THE LIVING BODY.

_The Steam Engine in Action takes_:

1. Fuel: coal and wood, both combustible.

2. Water for evaporation.

3. Air for combustion.

_And Produces_:

4. A steady boiling heat of 212 by quick combustion.

5. Smoke loaded with carbonic acid and watery vapor.

6. Incombustible ashes.

7. Motive force of simple alternate push and pull in the piston, which, acting through wheels, bands, and levers, does work of endless variety.

8. A deficiency of fuel, water, or air, disturbs, then stops the motion.

_The Animal Body in Life takes_:

1. Food: vegetables and flesh, both combustible.

2. Water for circulation.

3. Air for respiration.

_And Produces_: