by Edmond About
CHAPTER III.
THE CRIME OF THE LEARNED PROFESSOR MEISER.
"Ladies," said Leon, "Professor Meiser was no vulgar malefactor, but aman devoted to science and humanity. If he killed the French colonel whoat this moment reposes beneath my coat tails, it was for the sake ofsaving his life, as well as of throwing light on a question of thedeepest interest, even to each one of you.
"The duration of our existence is very much too brief. That is a factwhich no man can contradict. We know that in a hundred years, not one ofthe nine or ten persons assembled in this house will be living on theface of the earth. Is not this a deplorable fact?"
Mlle. Sambucco heaved a heavy sigh, and Leon continued:
"Alas! Mademoiselle, like you I have sighed many a time at thecontemplation of this dire necessity. You have a niece, the mostbeautiful and the most adorable of all nieces, and the sight of hercharming face gladdens your heart. But you yearn for something more; youwill not be satisfied until you have seen your little grand nephewstrotting around. You will see them I earnestly believe. But will yousee their children? It is doubtful. Their grandchildren? Impossible! Inregard to the tenth, twentieth, thirtieth generation, it is useless evento dream.
"One _will_ dream of it, nevertheless, and perhaps there is no man whohas not said to himself at least once in his life: 'If I could but cometo life again in a couple of centuries!' One would wish to return toearth to seek news of his family; another, of his dynasty. A philosopheris anxious to know if the ideas that he has planted will have bornefruit; a politician, if his party will have obtained the upper hand; amiser, if his heirs will not have dissipated the fortune he has made; amere land-holder, if the trees in his garden will have grown tall. Noone is indifferent to the future destinies of this world, which wegallop through in a few years, never to return to it again. Who has notenvied the lot of Epimenides, who went to sleep in a cave, and, onreopening his eyes, perceived that the world had grown old? Who has notdreamed, on his own account, of the marvellous adventure of the sleepingBeauty in the wood?
"Well, ladies, Professor Meiser, one of the least visionary men of theage, was persuaded that science could put a living being to sleep andwake him up again at the end of an infinite number of years--arrest allthe functions of the system, suspend life itself, protect an individualagainst the action of time for a century or two, and afterwardsresuscitate him."
"He was a fool then!" cried Madame Renault.
"I wouldn't swear it. But he had his own ideas touching the main-springwhich moves a living organism. Do you remember, good mother mine, theimpression you experienced as a little girl, when some one first showedyou the inside of a watch in motion? You were satisfied that there was arestless little animal inside the case, who worked twenty-four hours aday at turning the hands. If the hands stopped going, you said: 'It isbecause the little animal is dead.' Yet possibly he was only asleep.
"It has since been explained to you that a watch contains an assemblageof parts well fitted to each other and kept well oiled, which, beingwound, can be considered to move spontaneously in a perfectcorrespondence. If a spring become broken, if a bit of the wheel work beinjured, or if a grain of sand insinuate itself between two of theparts, the watch stops, and the children say rightly: 'The little animalis dead.' But suppose a sound watch, well made, right in everyparticular, and stopped because the machinery would not run from lack ofoil; the little animal is not dead; nothing but a little oil is neededto wake him up.
"Here is a first-rate chronometer, made in London. It runs fifteen dayswithout being wound. I gave it a turn of the key yesterday: it has,then, thirteen days to run. If I throw it on the ground, or if I breakthe main-spring, all is over. I will have killed the little animal. Butsuppose that, without damaging anything, I find means to withdraw or dryup the fine oil which now enables the parts to slip upon one another:will the little animal be dead? No! It will be asleep. And the proof isthat I can lay my watch in a drawer, keep it there twenty-five years,and if, after a quarter of a century, I put a drop of oil on it, theparts will begin to move again. All that time would have passed withoutwaking up the little sleeping animal. It will still have thirteen daysto go, after the time when it starts again.
"All living beings, according to the opinion of Professor Meiser, arewatches, or organisms which move, breathe, nourish themselves, andreproduce themselves as long as their organs are intact and properlyoiled. The oil of the watch is represented in the animal by an enormousquantity of water. In man, for example, water provides about four-fifthsof the whole weight. Given--a colonel weighing a hundred and fiftypounds, there are thirty pounds of colonel and a hundred and twentypounds, or about sixty quarts, of water. This is a fact proven bynumerous experiments. I say a colonel just as I would say a king; allmen are equal when submitted to analysis.
"Professor Meiser was satisfied, as are all physiologists, that tobreak a colonel's head, or to make a hole in his heart, or to cut hisspinal column in two, is to kill the little animal; because the brain,the heart, the spinal marrow are the indispensable springs, withoutwhich the machine cannot go. But he thought too, that in removing sixtyquarts of water from a living person, one merely puts the little animalto sleep without killing him--that a colonel carefully dried up, canremain preserved a hundred years, and then return to life whenever anyone will replace in him the drop of oil, or rather the sixty quarts ofwater, without which the human machine cannot begin moving again.
"This opinion, which may appear inadmissible to you and to me too, butwhich is not absolutely rejected by our friend Doctor Martout, restsupon a series of reliable observations which the merest tyro can verifyto-day. There _are_ animals which can be resuscitated: nothing is morecertain or better proven. Herr Meiser, like the Abbe Spallanzani andmany others, collected from the gutter of his roof some little driedworms which were brittle as glass, and restored life to them by soakingthem in water. The capacity of thus returning to life, is not theprivilege of a single species: its existence has been satisfactorilyestablished in numerous and various animals. The genus Volvox--thelittle worms or wormlets in vinegar, mud, spoiled paste, or grain-smut;the Rotifera--a kind of little shell-fish protected by a carapace,provided with a good digestive apparatus, of separate sexes, having anervous system with a distinct brain, having either one or two eyes,according to the genus, a crystalline lens, and an optic nerve; theTardigrades--which are little spiders with six or eight legs, separatesexes, regular digestive apparatus, a mouth, two eyes, a very welldefined nervous system, and a very well developed muscular system;--allthese die and revive ten or fifteen times consecutively, at the will ofthe naturalist. One dries up a rotifer: good night to him; somebodysoaks him a little, and he wakes up to bid you good day. All dependsupon taking great care while he is dry. You understand that if any oneshould merely break his head, no drop of water, nor river, nor oceancould restore him.
"The marvellous thing is, that an animal which cannot live more than ayear, like the minute worm in grain-smut, can lie by twenty-four yearswithout dying, if one has taken the precaution of desiccating him.
"Needham collected a lot of them in 1743; he presented them to MartinFolkes, who gave them to Baker, and these interesting creatures revivedin water in 1771. They enjoyed a rare satisfaction in elbowing their owntwenty-eighth generation. Wouldn't a man who should see his owntwenty-eighth generation be a happy grandfather?
"Another no less interesting fact is that desiccated animals have vastlymore tenacity of life than others. If the temperature were suddenly tofall thirty degrees in this laboratory, we should all get inflammationof the lungs. If it were to rise as much, there would be danger ofcongestion of the brain. Well, a desiccated animal, which is notabsolutely dead, and which will revive to-morrow if I soak it, faceswith impunity, variations of ninety-five degrees and six-tenths. M.Meiser and plenty of others have proved it.
"It remains to inquire, then, if a superior animal, a man for instance,can be desiccated without any more disastrous consequences than a li
ttleworm or a tardigrade. M. Meiser was convinced that it is practicable; hewrote to that effect in all his books, although he did not demonstrateit by experiment.
"Now where would be the harm in it, ladies? All men curious in regard tothe future, or dissatisfied with life, or out of sorts with theircontemporaries, could hold themselves in reserve for a better age, andwe should have no more suicides on account of misanthropy.Valetudinarians, whom the ignorant science of the nineteenth centurydeclares incurable, needn't blow their brains out any more; they canhave themselves dried up and wait peaceably in a box until Medicineshall have found a remedy for their disorders. Rejected lovers need nolonger throw themselves into the river; they can put themselves underthe receiver of an air pump, and make their appearance thirty yearslater, young, handsome and triumphant, satirizing the age of their cruelcharmers, and paying them back scorn for scorn. Governments will giveup the unnatural and barbarous custom of guillotining dangerous people.They will no longer shut them up in cramped cells at Mazas to completetheir brutishness; they will not send them to the Toulon school tofinish their criminal education; they will merely dry them up inbatches--one for ten years, another for forty, according to the gravityof their deserts. A simple store-house will replace the prisons, policelock-ups and jails. There will be no more escapes to fear, no moreprisoners to feed. An enormous quantity of dried beans and mouldypotatoes will be saved for the consumption of the country.
"You have, ladies, a feeble delineation of the benefits which DoctorMeiser hoped to pour upon Europe by introducing the desiccation of man.He made his great experiment in 1813 on a French colonel--a prisoner, Ihave been told, and condemned as a spy by court-martial. Unhappily hedid not succeed; for I bought the colonel and his box for the price ofan ordinary cavalry horse, in the dirtiest shop in Berlin."