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is yet, in its results, so like the operations of reason, presents a subject of just admiration.

The act of swallowing, the propulsion of the food into the gullet, and the temporary closing of the windpipe at such a time, is just as surprising. This latter operation is never deranged but by the interference of the will. If the individual attempts to speak—that is, to govern these parts by the will, when they should be left to these instinctive operations; or if terror, or some such mental excitement, prevail at the moment of swallowing, then the morsel may stick in the throat.

All this shows how perfect the operations of nature are, and how well it is provided that the vital motions should be withdrawn from the control of reason, and even of volition, and subjected to a more uniform and certain law.

But the point to which we would carry the reader is this, that though there are the proper sensibilities of the body, with reference to perception or consciousness, yet there are others no less curious, which control the internal operations of the economy; and that the mechanical provisions are but a type of what is promised to him who will look into the sensibilities of the body for the proof of power and contrivance.

Now the human stomach, though not so complicated in its apparatus of macerating and digesting vats, is possessed of a no less wonderful degree of governing sensibility, which may be trusted as surely as the most skilful physiologist.

We are told that we must not drink at meals, lest the fluid interfere with the operation of digestion; of this there need be no apprehension. The stomach separates and lets off with the most curious skill all superfluous fluid through its orifice, while it retains the matter fit for digestion. It retains it in its left extremity, permitting the fluid to pass into the intestines, there to supply the other wants of the system no less important than the digestion. The veterinary professor Coleman, ascertained that a pail of water passed through the stomach and intestines of a horse at the rate of ten feet in the minute, until it reached the cæcum. Drinking at a stated period after meals, say an hour, is at variance with both appetite and reason. The digestion is then effectually interfered with; for what was solid has become a fluid, (the chyme.) This fluid is already in part assimilated; it has undergone the first of those changes which fit it ultimately to

be the living blood; and the drink mixing with this chyme in the inferior extremity of the stomach, or first intestine, must produce disturbance, and interrupt the work of assimilation.

UTILITY OF PAIN.

A modern philosopher, of whom, in this instance, it would be difficult to say whether he be serious or playful, with some plausibility, however, asserts, that it might be possible to carry on the business of life without pain. If animals can

be free from it an hour, they might enjoy a perpetual exemption from it. Animals might be constantly in a state of enjoyment; instead of pain, they might feel a diminution of pleasure, and might thus be prompted to seek that which is necessary to their existence.

In the lower creatures, governed by instinct, there may be, for aught we know, some such condition of existence. But the complexity and delicacy of the human frame is necessary for sustaining those powers or attributes which are in correspondence with superior intelligence; since they are not in relation to the mind alone, but intermediate between it and the external material world. Grant that vision is necessary to the development of thought, the organ of it must be formed with relation to light. Speech, so necessary to the development of the reasoning faculties, implies a complex and exceedingly delicate organ, to play on the atmosphere around us. It is not to the mind that the various organizations are wanted, but to its condition in relation to a material world.

The necessity of this delicate structure being admitted, it must be preserved by the modifications of sensibility, which shall either instinctively protect the parts, or rouse us into powerful and instantaneous activity. Could the eye guard itself, unless it possessed sensibility greater than the skin? Could it guard itself, unless this sensibility were in consent with an apparatus which acted as quick as thought? Could we, by the mere influence of pleasure, or by any cessation or variation of pleasurable feelings, be made alive to those injuries which might reach the lungs by substances being carried in with the air we breathe? Is there anything but the sense which gives rise to the apprehension of suffocation,

that would produce the instant and sudden effort which could guard the throat from the intrusion of what was offensive or injurious? Pleasure is at the best a poor motive to exertion, and rather induces to languor and indulgence, and at length indifference. To say that animals might be continually in a state of enjoyment, and that when urged by the necessities of nature, such as thirst, hunger, and weariness, they might only feel a diminution of pleasure, is not only to alter man's nature, but external nature also; for, whilst there are earth, rocks, woods, and water for our theatre of existence, the textures of our bodies must be exposed to injuries, from which they can only be protected by a sensibility adapted to each part, and capable of rousing us to the most animated exertions. Take away pain, and take also away the material world, by which we are continually threatened with injury, and what, after all, is this, but imagining a future state of existence, instead of that in which mind and matter are combined? If all were smooth in our path, if there were neither rugged places nor accidental opposition, whence should we derive those affections of our minds, which we call enterprise, fortitude, and patience?

Independent of pain, which protects us more powerfully than a shield, there is inherent in us, and for a similar purpose, an innate horror of death. "And what thinkest thou (said Socrates to Aristodemus) of this continual love of life, this dread of dissolution, which takes possession of us from the moment that we are conscious of existence ?" "I think of it (answered he) as the means employed by the same great and wise Artist, deliberately determined to preserve what he has made."

The reader will no doubt here observe the distinction. We have experience of pain from injuries, and learn to avoid them; but we can have no experience of death, and therefore the Author of our being has implanted in us an innate horror at dissolution; and we may see this principle extended through the whole of animated nature. Where it is possible to be taught by experience, we are left to profit by it, but where we can have none, feelings are engendered without it. And this is all that was necessary to show how the life is guarded; sometimes by mechanical strength, as in the skull; sometimes by acute sensation, as in the skin and in the eye; sometimes by innate affections of the mind, as in the horror of death, which will prevail as

the voice of nature, when we can no longer profit by experi

ence.

But the highest proof of benevolence is this, that we have the chiefest source of happiness in ourselves. Every creature has pleasure in the mere exercise of his body, as well as in the languor and repose that follow exertion; but these conditions are so balanced, that we are impelled to change, and every change is an additional source of enjoyment. What is apparent in the body is true of the mind also. The great source of happiness is to be found in the exercise of talents, and perhaps the greatest of all is when the ingenuity of the mind is exercised in the dexterous employment of the hands. Idle men do not know what is meant here: but nature has implanted in us this stimulus to exertion, that she has given to the ingenious artist-the man who invents, and with his hands creates, a source of delight, perhaps greater, certainly more uninterrupted, than belongs to the possession of higher intellectual powers, and far beyond any that falls to the lot of the minion of fortune.

We believe that every thinking person may have wherewithal in his own sphere to tutor him, and bring him to the temper of mind and belief which we would inculcate. Yet there is something peculiarly appropriate in the study of our own bodies. In chemistry we are so much the agents as to forget the law, and the law itself seems at least to intermit. But in the changes wrought in the animal frame, the directing power is uniform in its influence, and holds all in harmony of action.

We now learn without difficulty and without mystery, what is meant by organic and animal sensibility. The first is that condition of the living organ, which makes it sensible of an impression, on which it reacts and performs its functions. It appears from what has preceded, that this sensibility may cause the blowing of a flower or the motion of a heart. The animal sensibility is indeed an improper term, because it would seem to imply that its opposite, organic sensibility, was not also animal; but it means that impression which is referred to the sensorium; where (when action is excited) perception and the effort of the will are intermediate agents between the sensation and the action or motion.

CHANGES IN THE MATERIAL OF THE ANIMAL BODY

DURING LIFE.

It is beautiful to see the shooting of a crystal;-to note, first, the formation of integrant particles from their elements in solution, and these, assuming a regular form under the influence of attraction or crystalline polarity, producing a determinate shape; but the form is permanent. In the different processes of elective attraction, and in fermentation, we perceive a commotion, but in a little time the products are formed, and the particles are at rest. There is in these instances nothing like the revolutions of the living animal substance, where the material is alternately arranged and decomposed. The end of this is, that the machinery of the body is ever new, and possesses a property within itself of mending that which was broken, of throwing off that which was useless, and of building up that which was insecure and weak; of repelling disease, or of controlling it, and substituting what is healthful for that which is morbid. The whole animal machinery we have seen to be a thing fragile and exposed to injury; without this continual change of material, and this new modelling of that material, our lives would be more precarious; the texture of our bodies would be spoiled, like some fine piece of mechanism which had stopped, and no workman would have science sufficient to reconstruct it. But by this process, the minute particles of the body die successively; not as in the final death of the whole body, but part by part is deprived of its vitality, and taken away into the general circulation, whilst new parts are endowed with the property of life, and are built up in their place. By this revolution we see nature, instead of having to establish a new mode of action for every casualty, heals all wounds, unites all broken bones, throws off all morbid parts by the continuance of its usual operations; and the surgeon who is modest in his calling, has nothing to do but to watch, lest ignorance or prejudice interfere with the process of This property of the living body to restore itself when deranged, or to heal itself when broken or torn, is an action which so frequently assumes the appearance of reason, as if it were adapting itself to the particular occasion, that even the last great luminary in this science, Mr. John Hunter, speaks of parts of the body, as "conscious of their

nature.

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