"What Is Man?"

1919

Interesting Answer Dealing With Physical Makeup

A man weighing 150 pounds will contain approximately 3,500 cubic feet of gas — oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen — in his constitution, which at 80 cents a thousand cubic feet would be worth $2.80 for illuminating purposes, asserts a writer in the Electrical Experimenter.

He also contains all the necessary fats to make a 15-pound candle, and thus, together with his 3,500 cubic feet of gases, he possesses considerable illuminating possibilities. His system contains twenty-two pounds and ten ounces of carbon, or enough to make 780 dozen, or 9,360 lead pencils. There are about fifty grains of iron in his blood and the rest of the body would supply enough of this metal to make one spike large enough to hold his weight.

A healthy man contains fifty-four ounces of phosphorus. This deadly poison would make 800,000 matches or enough poison to kill 500 persons. This, with two ounces of lime, make the stiff bones and brains. No difference how sour a man looks, he contains about sixty lumps of sugar of the ordinary cubical dimensions, and to make the seasoning complete, there are twenty spoonfuls of salt.

If a man were distilled into water, he would make about thirty-eight quarts, or more than half his entire weight. He also contains a great deal of starch, chloride of potash, magnesium, sulphur and hydrochloric acid in his wonderful human system. Break the shells of 1,000 eggs into a huge pan or basin, and you have the contents of a man from his toenails to the most delicate tissues of his brain.

And this is the scientific answer to the question, "What is man?"