Merde by Ralph Lewin, Aurum Press, 拢9.99, ISBN 1854106341
COPROLOGY is my bread and butter. My first feature for New 杏吧原创
was about shit on our beaches. And it has been a running theme ever since, from
laser monitoring of sewage to cattle farts and the greenhouse effect. I thought
I was alone in my obsession until I read Ralph Lewin鈥檚 scatological miscellany.
Here is everything you will ever want to know about why animal, as well as
human, turds come out in different shapes, sizes, colours and consistencies
鈥� and with frequencies varying from once a month (stand up, if you can,
the Guatemalan jumping viper) to once every three minutes (rabbits).
Judging by Lewin鈥檚 rapid-fire technique of splatting us with facts in
Merde, he is more of the rabbit persuasion. Fittingly, given the nature of
its life鈥檚 work, only the dung beetle gets a chapter to itself. The rest of the
animal kingdom just has to muck in. Piled high comes horseshit and bullshit and
chicken shit and wildebeest shit鈥�4000 tonnes of it dumped on the Serengeti
plains each day. But this is not mere waste.
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Ordure, we learn, has many uses. Its chemical analysis is useful in parrot
sexing and 鈥渇ingerprinting鈥� baboons. There have been wilder ideas: Hippocrates
believed that pigeon droppings cured baldness, while Pliny thought hippo
droppings cured epilepsy. Michelangelo used donkey droppings to give an
appearance of antiquity to his marble carvings. Young Masai women still
traditionally wear cow dung as a bridal crown.
Sadly, Lewin missed artists Gilbert and George鈥檚 recent excursion into
sculpting in human excrement. But I was pleased to find he has included one of
my all-time favourite stories. In the late 1970s, military scientists in the US
became obsessed with the idea that communist insurgents in the jungles of
Southeast Asia had been fighting chemical warfare. In a series of long, learned
articles, they cited as proof the presence of spots on leaves that they called
鈥測ellow rain鈥�. This vivid reworking of the yellow-peril myth was, quite
literally, bee shit. For the yellow rain turned out to be the result of mass
defecation by tropical bees at the height of the monsoon. It calls for a remake
of Apocalypse Now, at the least, with bees replacing those
helicopters.
In a more everyday vein, it is no surprise to find dung used as a
fuel鈥攙egetarians produce a great fibrous, steady-burn fuel. You can go
further: did you know dung ash is a great source of salt? Or that goat or
poultry dung, cut with tobacco or opium, smokes well? Dung is likewise well
known as a fertiliser鈥攈ere, the carnivores and piscivores come to the
fore鈥攚hether in the form of bucketloads of Chinese night soil, or as the
guano on South Pacific islands that kick-started 19th-century Australian
agriculture.
From the lavatory, Lewin explains things you鈥檝e always wanted to
know鈥攚hy do we sometimes produce floaters? And much that you never thought
to ask, such as why American toilet paper is an inch wider than British paper. I
never knew that Leonardo da Vinci invented the folding toilet seat, surely a
much more far-reaching invention than those drawings of helicopters. And no
jokes about the Mona Lisa, please.
Then there is the strange case of the Penrose pattern and bum morphology.
British mathematician Roger Penrose designed a unique geometric tiling pattern
which, when applied to toilet paper, somehow made it feel softer. Manufacturers
found the discovery so important that their attempts to impose it on the
posteriors of the world are now the subject of a major legal battle. (They
didn鈥檛 ask him first.)
A few things are deemed off limits. 鈥淭he ballistics of flung faeces is a
special subject,鈥� he says. This is a disappointment because it would have
allowed space for the research that found that a third of all the human excreta
produced in one Nairobi slum of my acquaintance is disposed of by catapulting it
into the air.
Which brings us to the question of how often we should go. This is deep
territory. Apparently, Sigmund Freud was constipated for most of his life, which
explains an awful lot. Apparently, too, the Kellogg family, of cornflake fame,
decreed we should evacuate our bowels five times a day. That might explain why
they launched All Bran, their laxative cereal.
In Anglo-Saxon households, potty training has always been a highly charged
activity, of course. And strict Victorian nannies always used castor oil to keep
their charges regular. Lewin adds an undiscovered political dimension to this
great debate. Mussolini equated constipation with cryptocommunism, he says, and
prescribed castor oil as a cure for antifascism.
Sticking with the perils of constipation, Lewin reports a story circulating
on the Internet last year about a German zoo keeper who administered an enema to
an elephant, only to be crushed to death beneath an outpouring of the relieved
animal鈥檚 dung. Sadly, the tale turns out to be a load of bull. It is true that
hospital surgeons occasionally blow themselves up by using electric knives on
gas-filled rectums. Has anyone checked whether spontaneous combustion correlates
with eating baked beans?
Then we get down to 鈥渟mells and other chemical components鈥�. A fascinating
chapter addresses vital aromatic questions. Why exactly do baked beans make
smelly farts? Does farting run in families? (Yes, it does.) And why do aphids
have the sweetest-smelling shit?
Perhaps discouraged by his publisher, Lewin forewent the obvious title for
his book. 鈥淢erde鈥� is what a French general, Cambronne, famously remarked on
learning of his country鈥檚 defeat at the Battle of Waterloo. Victor Hugo called
it 鈥渢he finest word ever spoken by a Frenchman鈥�.
But it is not only humans that use the expletive when frustrated.
Chimpanzees, Lewin tells us, also indicate their anger by giving the sign they
for their faeces.