Prefatory Chapter: An Old Professor of Animal Husbandry Ruminates

Abstract

When an old professor indulges in reminiscences some of his listeners may fear that he has reached the stage of rumination, and has therefore started to waste their time by rechewing old stuff. But a cow who indulges in chewing the cud assists her microbial co-workers by making material digestible which otherwise would be useless. I hope the readers of this preface will look at this more positive aspect of rumination and will bear in a friendly mood the frequent "I" and the seriousness with which I take myself and my cud. EFFICIENCY OF ENERGY UTILIZATION AND BODY SIZEIn the third volume of the Annual Review of Biochemistry (1934), Samuel Brody (I) discussed a German paper of mine on animal size and feed utilization [Tiergrosse und Futterverwertung, 1933 (2)] in which I deduced that the total efficiency (gain/food) of two animals is equal when, with equal partial efficiency (change in gain/change in food intake ) , their relative food intake (food intake/basal metabolic rate, or food intake per unit of the � power of body weight) is equal. Since empirical data indi cated that neither partial efficiency nor relative food capacity (maximum food intake per unit of the % power of body weight ) is correlated with body size, I concluded that in general the total efficiency of animal energy utilization is independent o f body size.J. In the fourth volume of the Annual Review of Biochemistry, Brody (4) extended the discussion of body size and efficiency of energy utilization. At his request I sent him a copy of a paper which I had submitted to the Jour nal of Nutrition. It was mainly a critique of the Palmer-Kennedy efficiency quotient (5) (food consumed/gain in weight times weight), which obvious ly makes the efficiency (the reciprocal of the Palmer-Kennedy quotient) proportional to body weight, an assumption that makes no sense.The Journal of Nutrition did not publish the article; my critique ap- To find out how the Lilliputians calculated Gulliver's food requirement we can formulate for Gulliver (G) and Lilliputian (L) as folows:log 17600 log . welght (L)The Lilliputians calculated the food requirement as proportional to the % power of body weight. This anticipates the results of Kleiber of 1932 (8), p = %, and those of Brody of a few months later in 1932 (9), namely p = 0.734, by at least 233 years since the Lilliputians applied this calcula tion at the time Lilliput was discovered, A.D. 1699.If the Lilliputians in their remarkable anticipation of the "man moun tain's" knowledge concerning body size metabolism and food requirement had stopped at A.D. 1839 when Sarrus & Rameaux (10) proclaimed the surface law of animal metabolic rate or even as late as 1883 when Rubner (11) or 1889 when Richet (12) rediscovered this law empirically and inde pendently, they would have fed Gulliver only the equivalent of 675 Lillipu tian rations since the square of the length ratio, 262, is 675. IDEA AND ACTIONTwo souls, alas! reside within my breast.Goethe, Faust, Part I, Scene 2:Ulrich von Hutten con fesseu, "I am not a fi nely planne...

Physiological essay on Gulliver’s Travels: a correction after three centuries

“…Life spans of most mammalian species also follow a power law with exponent 1/4 [ 6 , 9 ], though human beings survive longer than other mammals with similar W values, probably due to having a bigger brain [ 5 , 6 ]. Assuming that the brain size of the Lilliputians and the Brobdingnagians are proportional to that of Gulliver’s, their life spans would be 17 and 210 years, respectively, with Gulliver’s being estimated at 60 years (Table 1 ).…”

“…It is indeed surprising for me that nobody noticed this simple error for three centuries since publication in 1726. To the best of my knowledge, the only two exceptions are Max Kleiber, University of California at Davis, who published in 1967 a book chapter on this issue, but used misestimated values of Lilliputian height and did not take BMI into account [ 9 also cited in 10 ]. More recently, in 2014, A. J. Hulbert, University of Wollongong, Australia, published an article on Kleiber’s law, in which Gulliver’s Travels were briefly mentioned [ 11 ].…”

A Sceptics View: “Kleiber’s Law” or the “3/4 Rule” is neither a Law nor a Rule but Rather an Empirical Approximation

“…In later publications, he sometimes uses "mass 3/4 " instead of "metabolic rate". In a late publication [26], he proposed that when the Lilliputians calculated Gulliver's food requirements they must have used ¾ power of Gulliver's body mass. This proposition was based on his calculation that Gulliver was 26 times the height of the average Lilliputian.…”

The principal structures of physiology: what and where are they? The case of Barcroft's Architecture.

“…Many studying physiology think initially in terms of purpose-''white cells stick to the capillary wall and move into the tissue spaces in order to phagocytose streptococci'' or ''the purpose of the carotid sinus is to regulate the arterial blood pressure.'' Surprisingly few physiologists writing texts have faced up to this common way of thinking (13).…”