it having been dead for so long a time. Our stomach is the leanest,
slightest, frailest part of our body. It is master in the sense in
which it is said in the Gospel, "Let him that is first among you be
the servant of the others." It receives everything, but it gives
everything back, and keeps nothing, or almost nothing, for itself.
Between ourselves, Consul Menenius, the advocate of the Senate, had
no business to talk to the poor wretches at Rome of any comparison
between their government and so careful an administrator of the public
good as a human stomach. He should have taken his subject of comparison
from the families of geese or ducks--animals which have no teeth. These
have strong, well-grown stomachs--true Roman senators--whose stoutness
is in proportion to the work given them to do. But man provides his
with work already prepared by chewing, supposing him to have had the
sense to chew it, of course. It was not from a comparison with man,
therefore, that Menenius ought to have got his boasted apologue, which
was but a poor jest on the subject.

You did not expect, my dear, to come in for a lesson on Roman History
in a discussion on the stomach. But the study of nature is connected
with everything else, though without appearing to be so, and I was not
sorry to give you, incidentally, this proof of the unexpected light
which it throws, as we go along, upon a thousand questions which appear
perfectly foreign to it. Look, for example, at this old fable cited
by Menenius. For the two thousand years and upwards that it has been
in circulation, troops of historians, poets, orators, and writers of
all kinds, have passed it forward from one to the other, without having
troubled themselves to investigate the laws of nature in connection
with the stomach; therefore, not one, that I am aware of, has observed
this small error, so trifling in appearance, so important in reality,
which nevertheless is obvious to the first young naturalist who thinks