The Harmsworth Magazine, Vol. 1, 1898-1899, No. 4

MAN IS MADE OF--WHAT?

SOME FACTS ABOUT YOURSELF.

BY T. F. MANNING.

It is rarely realised what a queer combination of things exists in the human body. When the reader glances at these pages he will wonder whatever matches, candles, balloons, sugar-basins, soap, and all the other things illustrated have to do with the making of a man. At first sight the illustrations seem extraordinarily out of place; but when this article has been read through, he will then understand that the body is more or less of a chandler's shop in the making, for it is intended to show, in everyday language, something of its marvellous construction.

"Dust thou art" is a somewhat erroneous description of the body from a biological point of view. It would be nearer the mark to say, "You are mainly--over ninety per cent.--solidified soda-water."

Still nearer was the observation of a witty physiologist, that the greatest man on earth is only so much white of egg alive. To be strictly accurate, one should say that a man is an exceedingly complex mixture of gases, liquids, and solids, into all of which he will ultimately revert.

At the same time, this wonderful machine that walks, eats, thinks, talks, laughs, cries, and fights, consists of a very few simple elements. And, although we get our building materials from a wonderful variety of substances gathered from the four corners of the earth in the form of meat, fruits, vegetables, and condiments, they are to be found, as everyone knows, in any dairyman's shop. If one only knew how to do it, he could take 1,200 eggs, whisk them up, and build a complete and perfect man of 150 lbs. weight.

Solid as our body is, it is mostly made up of gases. The five familiar gases, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, chlorine, fluorine, and the three well-known solids, carbon, phosphorus, and lime--or, rather, calcium--constitute all but a trifling fraction of our whole bulk.

The mystery of life never does seem so deep as when one reflects that, by the mixture of these few substances in various proportions, nature makes kings, poets, warriors, saints, burglars, thieves, and all the rest of the great human hotch-potch.

To build a one-hundred-and-fifty pound man, only fourteen elements, altogether, are needed. Five of them are the above-named gases--there is enough gas in a man to fill a gasometer of 3,649 cubic feet--and nine are solids, found in almost any handful of clay you might take up at random; that is to say, carbon, calcium, phosphorus, iron, sulphur, sodium, potassium, silicon, and magnesium. In most people minute quantities of a few other things are found, such as copper, aluminium, manganese, lead, mercury, arsenic, and lithium; but these substances are probably always trespassers.

Far and away the most important element in flesh and bone is oxygen, and the bulk of that energetic gas which remains tranquilly compressed within us is something marvellous. In a ten-stone-ten man the weight of oxygen is no less than 106 lbs., and the natural bulk of it, if it were set free, would be equal to a beam of wood one foot square and 1,191 feet--nearly a quarter of a mile--long, or several hundred times the bulk of the body itself. Measured by the gallon it would fill 202 36-gallon barrels.

Even bulkier, though lighter, is the constituent hydrogen. Every man's body contains sufficient of this lightest of all substances to inflate a balloon that would lift himself, balloon, and tackle. In the ten-stone-ten man, for instance, the bulk of hydrogen is over 2,400 cubic feet--equal to the cubic space of a room ten feet high and 15-1/2 feet square, and the weight of it is a trifle short of 13-1/2 lbs.

Of that inexplicable gas, nitrogen, there is about half an ounce to each pound of body weight, or, approximately, 4-1/2 lbs. altogether, in a 150 lb. man. It is about twenty times the bulk of the body, and by no means likes being cramped up in a space of a few cubic inches. This is the most inert gas known. Its bulk in the body is 58 cubic feet.

The reason it is said to be lifeless is that it hates every other element in the world; and, while oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, and the other things, like the Continental Powers, cannot live alone, nitrogen, like England, will not, if it can possibly avoid it, live in company. From this trait arises not only all the action of the human brain and the strength of the muscles, but the terrible force of all the great explosives. While individually without any energy whatever, when it does chance to enter into union with other things nitrogen becomes the most energetic substance in existence.

The great explosive force of nitroglycerine is due to azote. One of the most frightful explosives known is chloride of nitrogen, which goes off if the sun shines on it, or if a leaf touches it; and, in the human body, it is the breaking down of nitrogen compounds which actually constitutes life. Nothing can be alive without nitrogen, itself the type of death.

The last of the substances of any bulk in the body is carbon. There is, as nearly as possible, a sack of 21-1/2 lbs. in a ten-stone-ten man, sufficient to make some sixty-five gross of lead pencils, sixty-five times as many as represented in our picture. It is veritably the fuel of the body, which both keeps us warm and gives us energy to move.

Thus it is the mainspring of animal life, which consists altogether of moving and keeping the body warm; the entire mechanism of the body, eyes to see, mouth and hands to grasp, stomach to digest, heart to circulate, and lungs to supply air, being designed to effect these two simple operations.

Although the above four elements form between 145 and 146 of a man's 150 lbs. of blood, flesh, and bone, the few pounds of the remaining elements are absolutely essential.

A MAN CONTAINS ENOUGH HYDROGEN TO FILL A BALLOON THAT WOULD LIFT HIMSELF--2,400 CUBIC FEET. ]

The erect posture, of which men are so proud, although it makes them the slowest-moving creatures of their size on earth and exposes them to all sorts of accidents, is due, primarily, to the two pounds of calcium and twenty-four ounces of phosphorus in their bodies. Without these, we should have no arms, legs, skulls, or teeth; we should have to crawl like worms, and to live on some pap-like food.

It seems very extraordinary, but if anyone works it out he will see that, if the body had to get on without its two pounds of common lime, there would be no machinery, ships, or railways, no guns and swords, no houses and cities, and human life would entirely consist of crawling out of some hole in the ground at sunrise, chewing berries and leaves, and crawling under the earth again at night.

Therefore, it is impossible to single out any element and say, "This is the most important element of the body." For not only the two pounds of lime, but the pound and a half of phosphorus, and the far less quantity of iron, are as essential as the 106 lbs. of oxygen.

What is most curious about phosphorus is that, being a powerful and terrible poison, the body can contain such a lot of it without suffering injury. Sufficient is scattered among the bones, the flesh, the nervous system, and the various organs to kill off a whole village, or to supply it with all the matches it requires. For the body contains sufficient phosphorus to make 8,064 boxes of matches containing 60 matches each.

What phosphorus does for the bones is plain enough. With calcium and oxygen it forms the exceedingly hard phosphate of calcium that gives the bones their rigidity.

No one appears to be perfectly sure what part it plays in the other tissues of the body. Something very forcible, certainly, for whenever sufficient is not present we grow listless; and nothing tones up the system, in some states of low health, like a course of phosphorus medication. If phosphorus is not precisely, as many people suppose, the element that gives man his intellectual power, it is absolutely essential to a high degree of nervous efficiency.

The amount of other elements may be set down as follows:--Chlorine, 4 ozs.; sodium, 3 ozs.; sulphur, 2-1/2 ozs.; fluorine, 2 ozs.; potassium, 1 oz.; magnesium, 12 grs.; silicon, 2 grs.

Estimates vary, however, and, as a matter of fact, the quantities of the elements in different men are by no means the same, nor are they always from day to day the same in any one individual. But, taking the whole of these last-named substances, they probably seldom exceed three-quarters of a pound, yet the machine would come to a dead stop without them.

Without iron, for instance, the blood could not carry oxygen, as it does, from the lungs to the remotest parts of the organism. There are only 48 grains, or one-tenth of an ounce, of iron in the blood; in the whole body there is only sufficient to make four or five tacks--vital tacks, for if you took them away from the body of the strongest man he would drop dead.

Sodium and potassium are equally necessary, and so are sulphur, chlorine, and fluorine.

But the part these take in the processes of life is better seen by observing what combinations they form and what ends these combinations serve. No element exists in the body alone and separate, except, indeed, some accidental traces of oxygen, nitrogen, and a few particles of carbon breathed in by the lungs. They are all present in compounds of extraordinary complexity, mostly put together in the vegetable world, as everyone knows, by some mysterious power of the sun.

And, as was said, all the force of the body is derived from breaking these complex compounds down into simpler combinations. We don't get all the good possible out of them, for we cannot dissociate them into separate elements, because elements have a horror of living separate, and it would take something more powerful than a man's bodily organs to make them do so.

Simple water is the most important compound of all--at least, the most abundant--consisting of hydrogen two parts, and oxygen one part. There are from 90 to 96 lbs., or say a barrel of 9-1/2 gallons, of pure water in a ten-stone-ten man. It has a large number of uses, but the main use is rather curious.

The greater part of bone and fat is what might be called lifeless tissue. The substance that makes the body alive is protoplasm, which forms the chief bulk of muscle, brain, nerves, lungs, heart, etc. And protoplasm exists in the shape of millions of minute globules set side by side, and more or less welded together. But these could no more live out of water than could a shoal of herrings. So that, wherever in the body protoplasm is--and it is almost everywhere--not only is it submerged in water, but it actually passes its whole existence in running water.

Nothing could be done in the body without water. It dissolves the food, carries the blood corpuscles, moistens the lining membranes of the mouth, nose, throat, and all the inside of the body, forms a sort of water cushion around the heart, lungs, and organs of the abdomen, cools us by evaporation as sweat, and does many other useful things. And the more water in the body the more vigorous the life. Restless children have more than adults, and the sluggishness of old age is in great measure due to a sort of bodily drought.