Food temporarily increases the production of heat, the rate of production steadily rising after a meal until a maximum is reached from about the 6th to the 9th hour.  If sugar be included in the meal the maximum is reached earlier; if mainly fat, later.  Muscular work very largely increases the production of heat, and hence the more active the body the greater the production of heat.

But all the arrangements in the animal economy for the production and loss of heat are themselves probably regulated by the central nervous system, there being a thermogenic centre—­situated above the spinal cord, and according to some observers in the optic thalamus.

AUTHORITIES.—­M.S.  Pembrey, “Animal Heat,” in Schafer’s Textbook of Physiology (1898); C.R.  Richet, “Chaleur,” in Dictionnaire de physiologie (Paris, 1898); Hale White, Croonian Lectures, Lancet, London, 1897; Pembrey and Nicol, Journal of Physiology, vol. xxiii., 1898-1899; H.M.  Vernon, “Heat Rigor,” Journal of Physiology, xxiv., 1899; H.M.  Vernon, “Death Temperatures,” Journal of Physiology, xxv., 1899; F.C.  Eve, “Temperature on Nerve Cells,” Journal of Physiology, xxvi., 1900; G. Weiss, Comptes Rendus, Soc. de Biol., lii., 1900; Swale Vincent and Thomas Lewis, “Heat Rigor of Muscle,” Journal of Physiology, 1901; Sutherland Simpson and Percy Herring, “Cold and Reflex Action,” Journal of Physiology, 1905; Sutherland Simpson, Proceedings of Physiological Soc., July 19, 1902; Sutherland Simpson and J.J.  Galbraith, “Diurnal Variation of Body Temperature,” Journal of Physiology, 1905; Transactions Royal Society Edinburgh, 1905; Proc.  Physiological Society, p. xx., 1903; A.E.  Boycott and J.S.  Haldane, Effects of High Temperatures on Man.

ANIMAL WORSHIP, an ill-defined term, covering facts ranging from the worship of the real divine animal, commonly conceived as a “god-body,” at one end of the scale, to respect for the bones of a slain animal or even the use of a respectful name for the living animal at the other end.  Added to this, in many works on the subject we find reliance placed, especially for the African facts, on reports of travellers who were merely visitors to the regions on which they wrote.

[v.02 p.0051]

Classification.—­Animal cults may be classified in two ways:  (A) according to their outward form; (B) according to their inward meaning, which may of course undergo transformations.

(A) There are two broad divisions:  (1) all animals of a given species are sacred, perhaps owing to the impossibility of distinguishing the sacred few from the profane crowd; (2) one or a fixed number of a species are sacred.  It is probable that the first of these forms is the primary one and the second in most cases a development from it due to (i.) the influence of other individual cults, (ii.) anthropomorphic tendencies, (iii.) the influence of chieftainship, hereditary and otherwise, (iv.) annual sacrifice of the sacred animal and mystical ideas connected therewith, (v.) syncretism, due either to unity of function or to a philosophic unification, (vi.) the desire to do honour to the species in the person of one of its members, and possibly other less easily traceable causes.