First Book in Physiology and Hygiene, J. H. Kellogg [pdf e book reader .TXT] 📗

bread, but is driven off by the heat of the oven in baking, so that we do not take any of it into our stomachs when we eat the bread. If we place a little baker's yeast in sweetened water, it will cause it to ferment and produce alcohol. To make alcohol, all we have to do is to place a little yeast and some sweetened water in a bottle and put it away in a warm place for a few hours until it has had time to ferment. You will know when fermentation has taken place by the great number of small bubbles which appear. When the liquid has fermented, you may prove that alcohol is present by means of the same experiment by which you found the alcohol in cider or wine. (See page 160.)

10. Alcohol is made from the sweet juices of fruits by simply allowing them to ferment. Wine, as you know, is fermented grape juice. Cider is fermented apple juice. The strong alcoholic liquor obtained by distilling wine, cider, or any kind of fermented fruit juice, is known as brandy.

11. How Beer is Made.—Beer is made from grain of some sort. The grain is first moistened and kept in a warm place for a few days until it begins to sprout. The young plant needs sugar for its food; and so while the grain is sprouting, the starch in the grain is changed into sugar by a curious kind of digestion. This, as you will remember, is the way in which the saliva acts upon starch. So far no very great harm has been done, only sprouted grain, though very sweet, is not so good to eat as grain which has not sprouted. Nature intends the sugar to be used as food for the little sproutlet; but the brewer wants it for another purpose, and he stops the growth of the plant by drying the grain in a hot room.

12. The next thing the brewer does is to grind the sprouted grain and soak it in water. The water dissolves out the sugar. Next he adds yeast to the sweet liquor and allows it to ferment, thus converting the sugar into alcohol. Potatoes are sometimes treated in a similar way.

13. By distilling beer, a strong liquor known as whiskey is obtained. Sometimes juniper berries are distilled with the beer. The liquor obtained is then called gin. In the West Indies, on the great sugar plantations, large quantities of liquor are made from the skimmings and cleanings of the vessels in which the sweet juice of the sugar-cane is boiled down. These refuse matters are mixed with water and fermented, then distilled. This liquor is called rum.

14. Now you have learned enough about alcohol to know that it is not produced by plants in the same way that food is, but that it is the result of a sort of decay. In making alcohol, good food is destroyed and made into a substance which is not fit for food, and which produces a great amount of sickness and destroys many lives. Do you not think it a pity that such great quantities of good corn and other grains should be wasted in this way when they might be employed for a useful purpose?

15. The Alcohol Family.—Scientists tell us that there are several different kinds of alcohol. Naphtha is a strong-smelling liquid sometimes used by painters to thin their paint and make it dry quickly. It does not have the same odor as alcohol, but it looks and acts very much like it. It will burn as alcohol does. It kills animals and plants. It will make a person drunk if he takes a sufficient quantity of it. Indeed, it is so like alcohol that it really is a kind of alcohol.

16. There are also other kinds of alcohol. Fusel-oil, a deadly poison, is an alcohol. A very small amount of this alcohol will make a person very drunk. Fusel-oil is found in bad whiskey. (All whiskey is bad, but some kinds are worse than others.) This is why such whiskey makes men so furiously drunk. It also causes speedy death in those who use it frequently. There are still other kinds of alcohol, some of which are even worse than fusel-oil. So you see this is a very bad family.

17. Like most other bad families, this alcohol family has many bad relations. You have heard of carbolic acid, a powerful poison. This is one of the relatives of the alcohol family. Creosote is another poisonous substance closely related to alcohol. Ether and chloroform, by which people are made insensible during surgical operations, are also relatives of alcohol. They are, in fact, made from alcohol. These substances, although really useful, are very poisonous and dangerous. Do you not think it will be very wise and prudent for you to have nothing to do with alcohol in any form, even wine, beer, or cider, since it belongs to such a bad family and has so many bad relations?

18. Some persons think that they will suffer no harm if they take only wine or beer, or perhaps hard cider. This is a great mistake. A person may get drunk on any of these drinks if a sufficient amount be taken. Besides, boys who use wine, beer, or cider, rarely fail to become fond of stronger liquors. A great many men who have died drunkards began with cider. Cider begins to ferment within a day or two after it is made, and becomes stronger in alcohol all the time for many months.

19. "Bitters."—There are other liquids not called "drinks" which contain alcohol. "Bitters" usually contain more alcohol than is found in ale or wine, and sometimes more than in the strongest whiskey. "Jamaica ginger" is almost pure alcohol. Hence, it is often as harmful for a person to use these medicines freely as to use alcoholic liquors in any other form.

20. Alcoholic liquors of all kinds are often adulterated. That is, they contain other poisons besides alcohol. In consequence of this, they may become even more harmful than when pure; but this does not make it safe to use even pure liquor. Alcohol is itself more harmful than the other drugs usually added in adulteration. It is important that you should know this, for many people think they will not suffer much harm from the use of alcohol if they are careful to obtain pure liquors.

21. Some Experiments.—How many of you remember what you have learned in previous lessons about the poisonous effects of alcohol? Do people ever die at once from its effects? Only a short time ago a man made a bet that he could take five drinks of whiskey in five seconds. He dropped dead when he had swallowed the fourth glass. No one ever suffered such an effect from taking water or milk or any other good food or drink.

22. A man once made an experiment by mistake. He was carrying some alcohol across a lawn. He accidentally spilled some upon the grass. The next day he found the grass as dead and brown as though it had been scorched by fire.

23. Mr. Darwin, the great naturalist, once made a curious experiment. He took a little plant with three healthy green leaves, and shut it up under a glass jar where there was a tea-spoonful of alcohol. The alcohol was in a dish by itself, so it did not touch the plant; but the vapor of the alcohol mixed with the air in the jar so that the plant had to breathe it. In less than half an hour he took the plant out. Its leaves were faded and somewhat shrivelled. The next morning it appeared to be dead. Do you suppose the odor of milk or meat, or of any good food, would affect a plant like that? Animals shut up with alcohol die in just the same way.

24. A Drunken Plant.—How many of you remember about a curious plant that catches flies? Do you remember its name? What does the Venus's fly-trap do with the flies after it catches them? Do you say that it eats them? Really this is what it does, for it dissolves and absorbs them. In other words, it digests them. This is just what our stomachs do to the food we eat.

25. A few years ago Mr. Darwin thought that he would see what effect alcohol would have upon the digestion of a plant. So he put a fly-catching plant in a jar with some alcohol for just five minutes. The alcohol did not touch the plant, because the jar was only wet with the alcohol on the inside. When he took the plant out, he found that it could not catch flies, and that its digestion was spoiled so that it could not even digest very tender bits of meat which were placed on its leaves. The plant was drunk.

26. Mr. Darwin tried a great many experiments with various poisons, and found that the plants were affected in much the same way by ether and chloroform, and also by nicotine, the poisonous oil of tobacco. Sugar, milk, and other foods had no such effect. This does not look much as though alcohol would help digestion; does it?

27. Effects of Alcohol on Digestion.—Dr. Roberts, a very eminent English scientist, made many experiments, a few years ago, to ascertain positively about the effect of alcohol upon digestion. He concluded that alcohol, even in small doses, delays digestion. This is quite contrary to the belief of very many people, who suppose that wine, cider, or stronger liquors aid digestion. The use of alcohol in the form of beer or other alcoholic drinks is often a cause of serious disease of the stomach and other digestive organs.

28. Effects of Alcohol on Animal Heat.—A large part of the food we eat is used in keeping our bodies warm. Most of the starch, sugar, and fat in our food serves the body as a sort of fuel. It is by this means that the body is kept always at about the same temperature, which is just a little less than one hundred degrees. This is why we need more food in very cold weather than in very warm weather.

29. When a person takes alcohol, it is found that instead of being made warmer by it, he is not so warm as before. He feels warmer, but if his temperature be ascertained by means of a thermometer placed in his mouth, it is found that he is really colder. The more alcohol a person takes the colder he becomes. If alcohol were good food would we expect this to be the case? It is probably true that the alcohol does make a little heat, but at the same time it causes us to lose much more heat than it makes. The outside of the body is not so warm as the inside. This is because the warm blood in the blood-vessels of the skin is cooled more rapidly than the blood in the interior of the body. The effect of alcohol is to cause the blood-vessels of the outside of the body to become much enlarged. This is why the face becomes flushed. A larger amount of warm blood is brought from the inside of the body to the outside, where it is cooled very rapidly; and thus the body loses heat, instead of gaining it, under the influence of alcohol. This is not true of any proper food substance.

30. Alcohol in the Polar Regions.—Experience teaches the same thing as science respecting the effect of alcohol. Captain Ross, Dr. Kane, Captain Parry, Captain Hall, Lieutenant Greely, and many other famous explorers who have spent long months amid the ice