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MANUAL

OF

POLITICAL ECONOMY.

CHAPTER I.

THE LAW OF ENDLESS CIRCULATION IN MATTER AND FORCE.

THE first and most imperious of human wants is Food. The functions of our nature are susceptible of a threefold classification, as Vegetative, Animal, and Spiritual; or, as it has been expressed, man includes Plant, Beast, and Angel. The vital or organic functions, which are common to vegetable and animal life, are continuous. They know no intermission. The plant is always assimilating the inorganic elements of the soil and the air, which contribute to its growth, and repair its constant waste. In man, too, the process of nutrition and decay is unceasing: once suspended it is never resumed, for its suspension is DEATH, and man becomes inorganic, resolving himself into the dust whereof he was made. The animal functions, on the contrary, experience periodical interruptions; their activity is suspended in regular intervals of sleep.

Another distinction between the vegetative, or organic, and the animal functions, consists in the independence of the first, and the dependence of the other upon the will. The animal sensibility is accompanied by a perception in the mind, as in seeing, hearing, tasting; animal contractility is excited by its volition, communicated to the voluntary muscles by the nerves; while organic sensibility is attended by no perception, and is followed by contraction totally

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LAW OF ENDLESS CIRCULATION IN MATTER AND FORCE.

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independent of the will. The chyle stimulates the lacteals without our knowledge, and is propelled by them without our aid. The heart beats, the blood circulates, the lungs inhale air, without waiting for a command; all the simply vital processes go on in man as in the mushroom, by their own impelling laws.

Functions which are thus ever-active, which have no natural intermission, and are neither originated nor controlled by the will, must obviously be supplied with the material for their action, before man can devote productive labour to the satisfaction of any want of less intensity. The more they require, the less can be given elsewhere. The less time, either the individual or society finds it necessary to devote to this object, the more will remain available for the gratification of other wants. The latter may employ, however, much of time or labour that may remain unemployed for the primary necessity; for it is the characteristic of man, in his higher nature, that his desires are illimitable, always propagated in widening circles, of larger extent as the ring made by a stone cast in the water creates another beyond it. The animal nature has no such quality, because its functions are carried on in a mechanical way, by the promptings of instinct, which is neither progressive nor improveable. It can find out no new pleasure; for all pleasure resulting from the activity of functions, where these are actuated by an unvarying force, their activity has a fixed limit, and the capacity for pleasure is equally constant. The round of its wants is small and unchanging; once satisfied, the stimulus to action is gone, and the animal nature reposes contented. Its constitution is adapted to a stationary condition, which it never seeks to improve. The foxes that Nimrod hunted had the same fleetness and cunning, and no less greed for poultry, or other vulpine luxuries, than those trapped by David Crockett. Crockett, on the other hand, desired a thousand things, to the wish for which, Ulysses, after all his wanderings and sightseeing, was a perfect stranger; and the men of the year 1900 will have as many new motives for exertion, as they will have comforts and conveniences of which we have no conception.

The laws which govern the production of Food are therefore at the basis of Political Economy, and upon these it must be built. To trace them in that large generality which the progress of physical

science, especially in organic chemistry, within the last quarter of a century, has enabled us to do, a few preliminary considerations are necessary.

The phenomena of the visible universe are resolvable into Matter and Motion. These in conjunction make Force; and Matter itself has been regarded, in a metaphysical analysis, as the result and the evidence of an equilibrium of forces. They are in perpetual flux and circulation. Man can neither create nor destroy a particle of matter, nor can he affect the quantity of force in the world. His power is limited to altering the mode of its manifestation, its direction and distribution. It is latent in matter, and he can set it free by destroying the equilibrium of other forces that hold it bound in quiescence. He may do this by giving the appropriate direction to some independent force existing in the storehouse of Nature, which, after accomplishing its mission, enters into a new equilibrium with one or more of the liberated forces, to remain at rest until again evoked for fresh labour. Every development of force, however, involves a consumption of matter-not its destruction, but its change of form. To generate in the battery a given amount of light or heat, to produce a certain amount of electro-magnetic motion, for the purpose of transmitting a message upon the telegraph wires from New York to Buffalo, a certain quantity of zinc must be burned by an acid and converted into an oxide. To propel a steamboat a hundred miles, a given quantity of coal must be decomposed into gas and cinders, and a given quantity of water turned into steam. To effect a muscular action of the human body, the brain - the galvanic battery of man's frame must send its message along the animal telegraph wires, the nerves, and in doing so part with a portion of its own substance; and the muscle, in obeying the command, undergoes a change by which a portion of its substance loses its vital properties and separates from the living part, uniting with oxygen and being transformed into unorganized matter, to be thrown out of the system. The gymnoti, or electrical eels of South America, by being stimulated to give repeated shocks, become exhausted, so that they may be safely handled. Long repose and abundant food are required to replace the galvanic force which they have exhausted It is no otherwise, except in degree, with man.

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The Electro-Magnetic Telegraph has made the action of its battery familiar to most of our readers. A number of plates of zinc and copper are arranged alternately in a vessel containing an acid. When the extremities of the apparatus are joined by means of a wire, however long, a chemical action begins upon the surface of the zinc, and a force is propagated along the wire, by which we can raise weights, set wheels in motion, and decompose compounds, the elements of which have the strongest affinity for each other. The moment the continuity of the wire is interrupted and the circuit broken, the force disappears, and the action between the acid and the zinc immediately stops. When the communication is restored the action of the acid upon the zinc is renewed, and the force which had vanished reappears with all its original energy. The substance of the wire, however, is merely the conductor of force, and does not contribute the slightest share to its manifestations. Something analogous to this is the office of man in regard to matter and the forces of Nature. He serves merely to give them circulation, without adding to or detracting from their quantity. His person is but a scene in the theatre of their action, in which they have their exits and their entrances, and each one in his time plays many parts, sustaining transmutations of force, and causing them; but they are immortal in their essence, and run in an endless vicissitude through a round of various utilities, for the maintenance of life and the means of life.

Our concern is with such matter and forces as are employed in human nutrition.

Man feeds upon both vegetables and animals. The animals he consumes are themselves nourished by vegetable aliment. The vegetables, in their turn, digest the inorganic elements supplied by the soil and the air. Modern chemistry has proved that the ultimate constituents of all, are Carbon, Oxygen, Nitrogen, and Hydrogen, the four principal elements of the organic creation, and sulphur, phosphorus, chlorine, lime, potassium, sodium, iron, and a few other inorganic substances.* These must be introduced into the

* "Of the human frame, bones included, only about three-fourths is solid matter-chiefly carbon and nitrogen-the rest is water. If a man weighing

vegetable or animal body, in order that it may live and grow.

From these few elements, combined in different numbers and proportions, are formed air and water, the rocks and the earths, which are the result of their decomposition.

That the elements incorporated into the frame of vegetables and animals, are derived from air, water, earth, and rock, has been demonstrated by repeated experiments, exhibiting the fact that the precise quantities of the identical elements gained by the former had disappeared from the latter, under circumstances artificially arranged so as to exclude the possibility of their being drawn from other contributories than those whose loss was to be examined. For detailed accounts of the experiments and reasoning by which these conclusions are demonstrated, we refer the student to the works of Liebig, and other writers on Organic Chemistry, who have pursued the path of inquiry which he opened and so successfully wrought.

The fundamental property of vitality, common to all organized bodies, consists in their constant material renovation; an attribute which distinguishes them from the inert or unorganized bodies, whose composition is always fixed. The latter may be artificially constructed by putting together their constituent parts; while no chemical skill is adequate to the production of wood, sugar, starch, fat, gelatine, flesh, &c., whose elements, though equally simple and equally well known, refuse to combine in organized compounds, otherwise than under the operations of that mysterious power which we call vital force. The growth of a crystal-the highest inorganic process we are acquainted with, involving but one action, that of accretion-may be conducted artificially by the chemist; while the growth of a simple cell, such as compose the yeast fungus, and the

160 pounds were squeezed flat under a hydraulic press, 120 pounds of water would run out, and only 40 of dry residuum remain. A man is, therefore, chemically speaking, a little less than fifty pounds of carbon and nitrogen, diffused through six pailsful of water. Berzelius, indeed, in recording the fact, justly remarks that the living organism is to be regarded as a mass diffused in water;' and Dalton, by a series of experiments tried on his own person, ascertained, that of the food with which we daily repair this water-built fabric, five-sixths is also water."-London Quarterly Review.

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