54 o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



The nervous system is the great inciter of nutrition : when 

 it is vigorous or excited, the digestion is active, the breathing 

 rapid, and the temperature high ; and the loss of weight and the 

 possible duration of abstinence follow the same rule. 



Man is subject to the same conditions in case of fasting or 

 starvation as warm-blooded animals ; and the influences of size, 

 age, and nervous constitution are similar upon him. This is 

 illustrated, in respect to age, in the legend of the family of 

 Ugolin, in which the youngest child died first, at eight years of 

 age, and the other children followed, while the father did not die 

 till three or four days after the death of the last of them. So, 

 in the wreck of the Medusa, the children died first on the raft, 

 the old men next, and the adults last. We might have supposed 

 that the old men would have resisted better ; but while they may, 

 perhaps, bear moderate fasting with less inconvenience than 

 more active persons, they are less able to endure starvation. 

 New-born infants are less capable of resistance ' than adults ; 

 but the young of animals puppies and kittens are more hardy 

 than we would be ready to suppose. Experiments on new-born 

 children have shown that they can offer considerable resistance 

 to external influences, provided they are well fed. Their mor- 

 tality is principally due to a deficiency of alimentation called 

 athrepsy, infants dying of which present the same lesions as 

 starved animals. Their fat is exhausted, while the weight of 

 their nervous system is not reduced. Another feature of the 

 starvation of infants is a relative increase in the globules of the 

 blood by dehydration ; not that the number of globules is greater, 

 but the proportion of them to the whole volume, a considerable 

 portion of the water having disappeared. 



The duration of the possible fast is considerably influenced by 

 fever. That is supposed to determine the production of poisons 

 which stimulate the nervous system and intensify the process of 

 denutrition ; so that under its influence, as has been observed in 

 experiments on animals and in man, the weight diminishes more 

 rapidly than under starvation alone. 



The influence of drinking is also noticeable. Of two dogs ob- 

 served by M. Laborde, one died in twenty days ; the other, which 

 could drink at will, was still living at the end of thirty-seven 

 days. There are also examples on the other side. Falck's dog 

 went sixty -one days without drinking or eating. Starving dogs 

 usually drink but little, as if warned by instinct not to drink 

 more than they have to. Water, in fact, expedites the wasting of 

 the tissues and accelerates the drain of the salts in the organism. 

 Hence, by drinking, we excrete more chloride of sodium, phos- 

 phates, urea, etc., so that, although in general animals deprived 

 of water do not live as long as those which can drink, there is 



