CHAPTER VII.

ON THE DECOMPOSITION AND METAMORPHOSIS OF ANIMAL BEINGS, AND ON THE INFLUENCE THEY EXERCISE OVER THE SOIL AS A HABITAT FOR MAN.

During life animal bodies undergo continual decomposition and recomposition; life is in fact a perpetual metamorphosis. Whilst alive, the products of vitality (excreta) are returned to or deposited in or on the surface of the earth, and carried by drainage and other means into the nearest water, river, or stream; we have lived to see them thrown en masse into a tidal river the waters of which serve at the same time to furnish most of that required for the economy of a vast capital and many surrounding towns; in the same country the cesspools and dead-wells constructed to receive the liquid and solid excreta of dwelling-houses are not unfrequently constructed close to the pump-well which is to supply the inhabitants with pure water for culinary purposes.

To these extraordinary facts I shall shortly return. They show the extent to which intelligent, talented, shrewd men may suffer themselves to be deluded and led aside from the path pointed out by common sense, more especially when crotchets are substituted for principles; when men fancy that in following out some imperfectly-observed inquiry, they are imitating nature--that nature which is ever consonant with herself, which created all animals, and which knows how to dispose of their excreta when living, and of their remains when dead, without detriment to the living. The Caffre, the Hottentot, the Bosjieman, the North-American Indian, the Bedouin, require no sanitary arrangements, no laws regulating, nor staff to carry out a code of theoretical Utopian schemes, sure to revert on the heads of those foolish enough to employ them; the excreta deposited on the earth disappear, so do also the remains of animal life. We never hear of any pestilence, fever, scurvy, dysentery, small-pox, hooping-cough, malignant sore-throat, or other zymotics, originating amongst them. It would, indeed, almost seem that such evils do actually owe their origin to human agency and to human civilization; where civilized man makes his highest endeavours, there his most signal failure occurs; experience teaches him nothing; the insolence of wealth naturally leads to the contempt of all knowledge derived from means otherwise than national and native. In Britain the muddy banks of rivers, which in Holland and Belgium are covered with vegetation, lie exposed, festering in the sun’s rays, the fertile source of agues and other diseases; here they are being continually exposed, or alternately covered with water, which is then allowed to evaporate; this mud is not suffered to rest, but stirred up in a variety of ways, as best suits the convenience of the parties interested. It suits, for example, the proprietor of a long-neglected drain or sewer, cesspool or filthy stagnant canal, or a common ditch, which once was a clear rivulet, to cleanse it out. He selects the warmest weather and the longest day for that special work, or he spreads the contents of the cesspools of half a century’s collection on the fields, suffering it to remain there for weeks, thus rendering the roads all but impassable. The selected lives of the finest men in the kingdom, petted, fed, clothed, and lodged at the public charge, without anxiety or a care for to-morrow--the Guards of England--die under his fostering hand, in the ratio of three to one of the care-worn and toil-exhausted peasant, miserably fed, scantily clothed, badly lodged, and full of anxiety for the morrow. Now, how comes this? Simply, I believe, from this--that man, knowing much better than nature, has chosen to take her place, to do her work clumsily, and to fancy that he is doing it well; to interfere, and not to carry through the works he has undertaken. What other proof can be required than the fact that, on the frontiers of the Cape of Good Hope, in the healthiest country in the world--a fact proved not only by the statistics of the celebrated statistician, Major Tulloch, but by the evidence of all medical men who have resided there,--where the mortality is not a half of what it is amongst the most favoured counties of England--in such a country, where every man might have had a mile square of ground to live on, military arrangements contrived to break down whole regiments of the healthiest young men England could produce.

Report, p. 176.

The Dutch Boers and Hottentots were astonished, as well they might be. “Towards the end of June, 1836,” observes Major Tulloch, “very decided symptoms of scurvy began to manifest themselves among part of the 75th Regiment at Fort Armstrong, and subsequently extended to most of the other stations along the frontier. The total number of cases reported either as scorbutus or purpura, were 134, of which 4 proved fatal; the others readily yielded to change of air, with improved diet and accommodation.” As was to be expected, the Hottentot troops, on the same ground, being left to act generally in accordance with the dictates of their own common sense, wholly escaped the disease.

Let us now briefly review the means adopted by nature for the disposal of those remains so embarrassing to the civilized, so innocuous to man living in a semi-barbarous or savage state, and which prove to the former a source of infinite expense, discomfort, and disease. The problem has reference to the soil, to the air, to the water; to the condition of all three as regards the preservation of animal life generally, man included.

I have already remarked in a preceding chapter, that all organized beings after death undergo a change, in consequence of which their bodies, as such, disappear from the surface of the earth. In a short time after the event, animal matters lose their cohesion; they are dissipated into the air, leaving only the mineral elements they had derived from the soil. The change commences immediately after death: with the aid of moisture and exposure to the air, the bodies of animals, as well as plants, undergo changes, the last of which are the conversion of their carbonic acid and of their hydrogen into water, of their nitrogen into ammonia, of their sulphur into sulphuric acid. Thus, their elements assume or resume forms in which they can again serve as food to a new generation of plants and animals. “The same atom of carbon which, as the constituent of a muscular fibre in the heart of a man, assists to propel the blood through his frame, was perhaps a constituent of the heart of one of his ancestors, and any atom of nitrogen in our brain has perhaps been a part of the brain of an Egyptian or of a negro.

Liebig, 1851.

“As the intellect of the men of this generation draws the food required for its development and cultivation from the products of the intellectual activity of former times, so may the constituents or elements of the bodies of a former generation pass into, and become parts of, our own frames. The proximate cause of the changes which occur in organized bodies after death is the action of the oxygen of the air on many of their constituents. This action only takes place when water--that is, moisture--is present, and requires a certain temperature.”

The great agent in all these changes is oxygen, as has been already sufficiently explained when speaking of the decomposition of vegetables after death. I shall first attend to the influence these changes have on the soil as producing agents, intended to restore to the soil those vivifying powers which it never seems to lose when man interferes not; and lastly, to consider briefly its influence on man himself.

The development of scarcely any plant can be imagined without the assistance of nitrogen or of azotized materials. Now, under certain conditions known to all botanists, this azote must come from rain water, either in the form of atmospheric air, or under that of ammonia. Chemists have, I think, proved that it originates in the ammonia contained in the atmosphere, and not in the azote as it naturally exists in the air. The problem is put and solved in this way by Liebig, “Let us consider a farm suitably conducted, and of an extent sufficient to maintain itself, ammonia exists there in a sufficient abundance in rain water and snow; in the water of most fountains; it exists in the air in abundance, and is being constantly renewed by the decomposition of animal and vegetable bodies, and is restored to the soil by the rain, and then absorbed by the roots of plants, and produces, according to the organs, albumen, gluten, quinine, morphine, cyanogene, and a great number of other crystallized combinations.”

The most decisive proof of the part played by ammonia in the nourishment of plants is furnished us by the use of manure in the cultivation of cereals and green forage. According to the distinguished chemist so often quoted in this essay, animal manure (fumier) acts solely by reason of its production of ammonia. The history of the Peruvian guano, a substance so highly ammoniacal, proves all these assertions; this celebrated manure, which fertilizes a soil (the Peruvian) of the most remarkable sterility, consisting mainly of white sand and argil, is composed chiefly of urates, urate of ammonia, oxalate of ammonia, phosphate of ammonia, carbonate of ammonia, and some other salts.

Thus did the ancient Peruvian, like the Chinese, stumble on the solution of problems involving the fate of millions by simple experience alone, wholly unaided by science, which steps in afterwards and gives the rationale of the process; teaches us that all wheats do not equally abound in gluten; that rice is poor in azote; potatoes equally so. Practical agriculturists still find difficulty in applying with success the processes recommended by the chemist; but these, no doubt, will gradually be overcome.

“Since we find azote in all the lichens which grow on basaltic rocks; that the fields produce more azote than is brought to them in the shape of aliment; that we meet with azote in all soils (terrains), even in minerals which happen never to come in contact with organic matters; that in the atmosphere, in rain-water, and in that of fountains or springs, in every description of soil we meet with this azote under the form of ammonia, as a product of the slow combustion or of the putrefaction of anterior generations; that the production of azotized principles greatly increases in plants with the quantity of ammonia presented to them in animal manure,--we may in all safety conclude that it is the ammonia of the atmosphere which furnishes the azote to plants.

Traité de Chimie Organique. Par M. J. Liebig. pp. 88.

“It results from the foregoing that the carbonic acid, the ammonia, and the water, include in their elements the conditions necessary for the production of all the principles of living beings. These three bodies are the ultimate products of the putrefaction and of the eremacausis (slow combustion) of all animal and vegetable races. All the products of the vital force, so numerous and so varied--all after death return to the primitive forms in which they first appeared or from which they originally sprung. Death, the complete dissolution of a generation, is always the source of a new generation.”

Liebig, loc. cit.

Equally curious, but foreign to my present purpose, is the inquiry into the sources of the inorganic principles in plants and animals. These sources were inappreciable until a more refined chemistry appeared. Sea-water contains only the 1/12,400th of its weight of carbonate of lime, and yet this quantity suffices for the production of the essential components of the shells of myriads of crustaceans and corals. Whilst the atmosphere contains but 4/10,000ths to 6/10,000ths of its volume of carbonic acid, the amount in sea water is more by a hundred times, and yet in this medium we find another world of animal and vegetable life, which finds re-united in the ammonia and carbonic acid the same conditions which enable human beings on the surface of the solid earth (terra firma) to live and to maintain their species.

It would even seem that the essential constituents of some organs have altered in the course of ages, without affecting, or being materially affected by, the principles of life. Thus it would seem that fossil bones contain the fluate (fluorure de calcium) of calcium in much larger quantities than the bones of recent animals; and the same remark has been made in respect of the composition of the crania of men found at Pompeii. They resemble in this respect the antediluvian fossil remains.

Thus, imperceptibly, as it were, proceed the grand operations of nature, and if accidentally any vast collection of excreta should happen to be found, as in the guano islands of the dry regions of America, they seem not to affect the life or health of those animals which repose on them. It is the same in the dry regions of Southern Africa, where sheep and cattle, in order to protect them from wild animals, must, on the approach of evening, be collected into a fold or kraal, surrounded by a strong fence of the mimosa, and carefully shut in. On this surface, of no great extent, sheep and oxen stand or rest for the evening: their excreta accumulate, but do not putrefy, for the air on the kraal is pure comparatively, and never injurious to the sheep or cattle; the surface of the kraal is, moreover, generally dry, even when the soil may be accidentally inundated by rain, which, when it falls, as it does occasionally, descends in torrents. From the African soil is thus withdrawn by man the excreta of all the domestic animals; the semi-barbarous Boer never returns it to the soil, and thus the loss is permanent; but it would seem that this loss, caused by man’s interference, in no shape, as far as can be observed, affects the fertility of the soil, called on to reproduce only the native pasture, or the wild herbs natural to it. It is otherwise when man demands from the soil heavier exhausting crops of wheat and hemp, tobacco, &c.: his interference with nature’s balance must be gone into, or soon his hopes of a harvest would be in vain. Then comes the theory of manures, a theory beset with difficulties, and which, besides involving man in much labour and expense, is productive, or presumed to be on sufficiently probable grounds the cause, of some, if not of many, of the diseases which afflict humanity. However this may be, whatever be the extent to which a dense population and a neglect of the so-called sanitary regulations subject man to infirmity and disease, one thing is certain--he has interfered with nature’s balance, and must take on himself the whole task. If he shuts up a harbour mouth, refusing entrance to the tide, confining within the harbour a portion of that ocean water which nature intended should be constantly agitated by tides and currents, he may expect as results that the shores of that harbour will soon become uninhabitable by man. All animals instinctively shun the sick, leaving them apart; man crowds them together into close, ill-ventilated hospitals, sweeping off in hundreds those whom the battle had spared.

It were foreign to the object of this work to enter more fully into the history of that dissolution of animal structures which forms so important a part of the materials we call manure, destined to restore to the soil that which artificial crops had deprived it of. Every part of animal bodies owes its origin to vegetables or plants, no part being formed by the vital force, and thus all the remains of animals of necessity form manures.

On the management of these, man’s civilization depends; without agriculture there can be no dense population; without the dense population there can be no civilization. On these points many remarkably erroneous opinions have been, and still perhaps are, maintained even by practical men, who nevertheless are often in error--merely, it is true, as to the theory on which they fancy they act, more rarely as to the practice they have from experience adopted.

In calmly considering this important question--the right management of manures composed of the excreta or the remains of animal and vegetable life, it becomes evident that several problems, atmospheric as well as terrestrial, remain yet to be solved. The surface of the soil, as modified by man’s labour, presents itself under a very different aspect to what nature intended it to be. A lake may be drained with much advantage to a country, but the surface so exposed cannot be too soon cultivated, to prevent the spread of fevers sure to arise from the decaying, fermenting, and putrefying of the lower forms of animal and vegetable life thus brought into existence, especially when aided by those epidemic constitutions of the atmosphere striking directly at man’s existence on the earth.

For civilized man there is, there can be, no repose. There are forces in nature against which, with all his industry, he may never be able to prevail. The tropical forest returns upon him the instant, as it were, that he ceases to hew it down, obliterating in an incredibly short time all traces of human labour. The lands of Western France can scarcely be secured from the inroads of the sands driven by western gales towards the interior; the bog is checked only by constant labour, and the hill where once the heath grew spontaneously, can only be retained in a green and grassy condition by the constant watchfulness and labour of men. Twenty years of neglect suffice to restore the heath, and to sweep away all vestiges of human culture.

The “Sunderland Times” gives publicity to the following frightful narrative, drawn up by Captain Edward Robinson, of Sunderland, commander of the ship Raleigh, of South Shields:--“I arrived at this place in the beginning of May, 1858, being sent to bring home a vessel whose captain died of yellow fever; little did I think, before leaving home, that I should have witnessed the sufferings of so many of my fellow-creatures that were ill of this dreadful epidemic. I was told it would be all over before I arrived, but I found that, so far from that being the case, its ravages were unmitigated. In the street that I lodged in, five in one family were buried from the house in one day. The Rio journals were publishing in their columns, ‘No cases of yellow fever to-day.’ One ship at the port had seven captains dead before she could be brought out of the place. The vessel--the Raleigh of South Shields--that I have come home in command of, had her captain, chief officer, second officer, and four of her crew stricken down by the disease. On the day before the Captain died I visited him at the hospital; I there witnessed such sights as I hope never again to see--poor sailors in the height of the fearful malady, with the black vomit, vomiting dark fluid like coffee. I shall never forget the looks they gave me, and how their poor dull eyes brightened as I gave them a word of comfort, and told them they would get better. Next day, when I returned to see them, I found the whole gone--the captain and six of his crew, all dead and buried. Still, ‘No cases of fever,’ say the Rio journals. The number carried off by yellow fever from February to May, 1858, amounted to 1609, upwards of 600 of the deaths being among English sailors. The presence of a plague fever is not to be wondered at, the state of the town being a disgrace to civilized people. All manner of filth is to be met with in most parts of the town. Dead animals and filth I cannot describe meet your eye and offend your senses almost everywhere.

“My brother, now sixty-eight years of age, and who has been thirty-six years at Rio, informs me that he has often seen Europeans on ’Change in the morning, who died and were buried on the same evening. He has seen Rio cleared five times of Europeans. The pestilence, he believes, comes from the flat marshy land near Rio. The natives burn tar-barrels to purify the atmosphere.”