Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 2 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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Lime Blackens The
Teeth; And In The Indian Archipelago, As Among Several American
Hordes, To Blacken The Teeth Is To Beautify Them.
In the cold regions
of the kingdom of Quito, the natives of Tigua eat habitually from
choice, and without any injurious consequences, a very fine clay,
mixed with quartzose sand.
This clay, suspended in water, renders it
milky. We find in their huts large vessels filled with this water,
which serves as a beverage, and which the Indians call agua or leche
de llanka.* (* Water or milk of clay. Llanka is a word of the general
language of the Incas, signifying fine clay.)
When we reflect on these facts, we perceive that the appetite for
clayey, magnesian, and calcareous earth is most common among the
people of the torrid zone; that it is not always a cause of disease;
and that some tribes eat earth from choice, whilst others (as the
Ottomacs in America, and the inhabitants of New Caledonia in the
Pacific) eat it from want and to appease hunger. A great number of
physiological phenomena prove that a temporary cessation of hunger may
be produced though the substances that are submitted to the organs of
digestion may not be, properly speaking, nutritive. The earth of the
Ottomacs, composed of alumine and silex, furnishes probably nothing,
or almost nothing, to the composition of the organs of man. These
organs contain lime and magnesia in the bones, in the lymph of the
thoracic duct, in the colouring matter of the blood, and in white
hairs; they afford very small quantities of silex in black hair; and,
according to Vauquelin, but a few atoms of alumine in the bones,
though this is contained abundantly in the greater part of those
vegetable substances which form part of our nourishment. It is not the
same with man as with animated beings placed lower in the scale of
organization. In the former, assimilation is exerted only on those
substances that enter essentially into the composition of the bones,
the muscles, and the medullary matter of the nerves and the brain.
Plants, on the contrary, draw from the soil the salts that are found
accidentally mixed in it; and their fibrous texture varies according
to the nature of the earths that predominate in the spots which they
inhabit. An object well worthy of research, and which has long fixed
my attention, is the small number of simple substances (earthy and
metallic) that enter into the composition of animated beings, and
which alone appear fitted to maintain what we may call the chemical
movement of vitality.
We must not confound the sensations of hunger with that vague feeling
of debility which is produced by want of nutrition, and by other
pathologic causes. The sensation of hunger ceases long before
digestion takes place, or the chyme is converted into chyle. It ceases
either by a nervous and tonic impression exerted by the aliments on
the coats of the stomach; or, because the digestive apparatus is
filled with substances that excite the mucous membranes to an abundant
secretion of the gastric juice. To this tonic impression on the nerves
of the stomach the prompt and salutary effects of what are called
nutritive medicaments may be attributed, such as chocolate, and every
substance that gently stimulates and nourishes at the same time. It is
the absence of a nervous stimulant that renders the solitary use of a
nutritive substance (as starch, gum, or sugar) less favourable to
assimilation, and to the reparation of the losses which the human body
undergoes. Opium, which is not nutritive, is employed with success in
Asia, in times of great scarcity; it acts as a tonic. But when the
matter which fills the stomach can be regarded neither as an aliment,
that is, as proper to be assimilated, nor as a tonic stimulating the
nerves, the cessation of hunger is probably owing only to the
secretion of the gastric juice. We here touch upon a problem of
physiology which has not been sufficiently investigated. Hunger is
appeased, the painful feeling of inanition ceases, when the stomach is
filled. It is said that this viscus stands in need of ballast; and
every language furnishes figurative expressions which convey the idea
that a mechanical distension of the stomach causes an agreeable
sensation. Recent works of physiology still speak of the painful
contraction which the stomach experiences during hunger, the friction
of its sides against one another, and the action of the gastric juice
on the texture of the digestive apparatus. The observations of Bichat,
and more particularly the fine experiments of Majendie, are in
contradiction to these superannuated hypotheses. After twenty-four,
forty-eight, or even sixty hours of abstinence, no contraction of the
stomach is observed; it is only on the fourth or fifth day that this
organ appears to change in a small degree its dimensions. The quantity
of the gastric juice diminishes with the duration of abstinence. It is
probable that this juice, far from accumulating, is digested as an
alimentary substance. If a cat or dog be made to swallow a substance
which is not susceptible of being digested, a pebble for instance, a
mucous and acid liquid is formed abundantly in the cavity of the
stomach, somewhat resembling in its composition the gastric juice of
the human body. It appears to me very probable, that when the want of
aliments compels the Ottomacs and the inhabitants of New Caledonia to
swallow clay and steatite during a part of the year, these earths
occasion a powerful secretion of the gastric and pancreatic juices in
the digestive apparatus of these people. The observations which I made
on the banks of the Orinoco, have been recently confirmed by the
direct experiments of two distinguished young physiologists, MM.
Cloquet and Breschet. After long fasting they ate as much as five
ounces of a silvery green and very flexible laminar talc. Their hunger
was completely satisfied, and they felt no inconvenience from a kind
of food to which their organs were unaccustomed.
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