The science of life : fully illustrated in tone and line and including many diagrams

BOOK 1

attention wandering. His digestive organs are calling for attention again.

So out he goes to lunch and then back again to his desk, or wherever it is that he works. Many people are doing the most various things about him in the City, but the lunch hour calls to them all. At lunch again he may seek the distraction of a book or paper, or talk with companions, There, perhaps, is something not quite like a machine. But whatever else he does, he eats. Before he goes to bed he will have to answer that imperious demand from within again. He may answer it once or twice. Three or four times a day he loads his stomach to keep his wheels going round—and several times, we must note, he has to deposit the residue of their working in appropriate places. There we have the fundamental and unavoidable element of his routine. And of everybody’s routine. Saint and sinner, plutocrat and proletarian, judge and criminal must all observe a similar round. All men must eat. Ali the rest of their activities are secondary to this daily necessity. These activities may vary endlessly with the accidents of private fortune and the chances of the day. On any particular day our Mr. Everyman may work or not; he may exhaust himself in his daily employment or be urged by a superfluity of energy to play, to seek amusement, make love, or quarrel. He may find such a sedative drug as tobacco useful in slowing down the urgency of his bodily engines. He may be pursued by danger or moved to deeds of violence by a fire or a dispute. Still he will eat or want to eat. Under abnormal conditions people have staved off eating for as long as forty days. It has left them exhausted and emaciated and manifestly on their way to extinction. After only a day or so their general activities have been restricted and their energies have been concentrated upon resisting a supreme urgency.

And at length after Mr. Everyman’s day of eating, etc.—the etc. may vary but the eating is constant—comes the night and the desire for sleep. ‘There again is another great universal, and our Mr. Everyman, however his afternoon and evening have been spent, realizes at last a growing need for repose. He makes his way back to the bedroom in which we found him, winds up his alarm-clock, puts his head on his pillow and drops back into the comparative inactivity of slumber. The daily round of life has completed its circle. Man must eat and also man must sleep. There may be

20

THE SCIENCE OF LIFE

GHAPTER 1

interruptions and delays, but that is the formula, and to disobey it for any length of time is death.

Now here perhaps in the sleep-necessity the critical reader may ask whether there is not a difference from any mechanism. Machines, he will say, do not sleep. That is almost true of such a simple and unvariable mechanism as a clock, which, regularly wound, may never cease ticking for years, but it is not true of such a versatile piece of engineering as an automobile which is subjected to constantly changing stresses. That must go out of activity periodically, for adjustment, lubrication, and minor repairs. The more complex the machine the greater the difficulty of keeping it in perfect adjustment. And Mr. Everyman, if indeed he is an apparatus, is a far more versatile apparatus than any automobile, and he and his kind and a vast majority of the higher creatures have made the habit of rest and reparation during the most convenient part of the twenty-four hours into a second nature. We shall have more to say of that necessity for readjustment when we consider the inevitability of old age and death. But even when Mr. Everyman sleeps, he is not all inactive. The mechanism is still moving. His heart, his lungs are not sleeping. They tick on just as the clock does, but at a slower, steadier pace than during the day.

Let us now compare the routine of Mr. Everyman, the most interesting of living creatures to us, with another daily round, at a rather lower level than his own. Mr. Everyman is sleeping, silent or gently snoring. If he has not eaten or if he had eaten badly his sleep would be slight and distressful, for digestion is more important than slumber, but we will assume that all is well within him. The house grows still. Presently the silence is broken by little sounds that echo disproportionately loud, a squeak and a little stir behind the skirting, a patter over the floor. Tt is Mr. Everymouse, another familiar embodiment of life, abroad.

For a mouse the day is a time of peril, a time when the world belongs to active, clumping, dangerous giants. Somewhere in a safe corner—behind a book-case, under the floor-boards, in a hollow wall—he has built ‘a nest, soft and warm, with such materials as he has been able to gather ; here he lurks during the day. At nightfall he grunts in his turn, and stretches and sallies forth to satisfy his tiny clamouring stomach. The life of a mouse in its physical essence is entirely parallel with that of a man. The mouse-life is largely spent like the man-life