HEAT AND LIFE. 



407 



rive from increasing, in all possible ways, the amount of meat used in 

 laborers' meals. Quite recently, at a manufacturing establishment of 

 the Tarn, M. Talabot has improved the strength and sanitary condi- 

 tion of his workmen by giving them meat in abundance. Under the 

 influence of a diet almost wholly vegetable, each laborer lost on an 

 average fifteen days work a year through fatigue or sickness. As soon 

 as the use of meat was adopted, the average loss for eacli man per 

 year was not over three days. Often enough, it must be owned, alco- 

 hol is only the workman's means of remedying the want of heat-pro- 

 ducing elements in his food ; a deceitful remedy, which buoys up the 

 system for a time, only to sap it afterward with alarming subtlety. 

 One of the best preventives of the abuse of alcohol would certainly be 

 the lessening of the cost of meat. 



From the point of view of the relation between heat and motion, 

 the living being may thus be compared to an inanimate motor, as a 

 steam-engine. In both cases, heat is engendered by combustion, and 

 transformed into mechanical work by a system of organs more or less 

 complex. In both cases it is at first in a state of tension, and yields 

 motion in proportion as it is demanded for the performance of certain 

 work. Only the living being is the far more perfect machine. While 

 the best-made steam-engines only utilize y^- of the disposable force, 

 the muscular system of man, according to Hirn, accounts for y 1 ^-. On 

 the other hand, the animated motor has this peculiarity, that its sources 

 of heat and its mechanical arrangements are intimately commingled, 

 that its heat is produced by organs in motion with a sort of general 

 diffusion, and that the machine itself becomes in turn transformed 

 within itself into heat ; an incredible complication, of which science has 

 succeeded in unravelling the simple laws only by dint of the united 

 efforts and resources of physics, chemistry, and biology. 



As some physiologists hold, heat must not only be the source 

 of motion in the system, but must also undergo transformation into 

 nervous activity. The functional action of the brain must be a labor, 

 exactly like that of the biceps. Mind itself should be regarded as en- 

 gendered by heat. Late experiments by Valentin, Lombard, Byasson, 

 and especially Schiff, would seem to prove, it is thought, that there is a 

 proportional and constant relation between the energy of nervous func- 

 tions and the heat of the parts in which they are effected. Gavarret 

 boldly concludes, from his researches, that heat has the same relations 

 to the nervous system that it has to the muscular system ; only, in the 

 case of the muscles, the force produced exhibits itself externally by 

 visible phenomena, while in that of the nerves it is exhausted inter- 

 nally in profound molecular action, which eludes any exact measure- 

 ment. A given sum of heat developed in the system would thus be 

 on one side a mechanical equivalent, and on the other a psychological 

 equivalent. Gavarret, who is a cautious savant and true to experi- 

 mental methods, doubtless does not go so far as to maintain that 



