"Still less do they come from the delusive inheritance of our progenitors. They are the indications of something within us, akin to something immeasurably beyond us; tokens of something attainable yet not hitherto attained, signs of a potential fellowship with spirits nobler and more glorious than our own; they are the title-deeds of our presumptive heirship to some brighter world than any that has yet been formed among the starry spangles of the sky."1

As to the brain, Dr Andrew Combe says, "We cannot conceive, even in the remotest manner, in what way the brain-a compound of water, albumen, fat, and phosphate salts operates in the generating of thought." We know and feel that thinking expends force; close, earnest, continuous application of the mind to high studies is hard work, and produces bodily exhaustion; but the power producing the impresses, by which we derive our conceptions, runs up, and is lost in the mental region; as well the faculty of knowing, as the materials of knowledge, being vastly more extensive than they appear. The mind which discerns stars and systems incalculably remote, and foretells their future movements, warrants belief of everything concerning the future which can be proved to come within the compass of analogy.

Now take a Mechanical and Chemical View.

A bowler, who imparts a velocity of 30 feet to an 8-lb. ball, consumes in the act one-tenth of a grain of carbon. A man, the weight of 150 lbs., consumes the heat of a grain of carbon in lifting his own body to the height of 8 feet. Jumping from this height the heat is restored. The consumption of 2 oz. 4 drs. 20 grs. of carbon would place the same man on the summit of a mountain 10,000 feet high. To maintain all this, he places food in his stomach, as so much combustible matter. It is dissolved by chymical processes, and the nutritive fluid is poured into the blood. It comes into contact with atmospheric oxygen, admitted by the lungs, and the production supplies animal heat, nourishment, and replaces. that which has been used in the wear and tear of life.

This, which is quite true of the body, as a machine; quite true, as to physics and chymistry; is applied to the brain; and "Modern Science and Natural Religion:" Rev. C. Pritchard.

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thence, altogether erroneously, to the mind: so much blood, so much phosphorus, so much heat, without which will be no brain, no thought. We say erroneously: for the difference is not only of degree but of kind that separates between the genius of Pascal and the mind of an idiot who suns himself under the wall that shelters him. The expenditure of the same heat, phosphorus, blood, will produce totally different results in the brain of Marat or of Howard, of Napoleon or of Milton. The adjustment of nutriment, qualitatively and quantitatively alike, to two brains, does not produce even the same kind of consciousness: the difference shall be as of light and darkness, as of good and evil, as of pure and impure. Hence, allowing that the physical frame is to be interpreted physically, the same process utterly fails as applied to the life—to the mind.

The molecular motion of the brain, linked to consciousness, has its own series of physical processes: but the stirring, the thrilling, utterly fail to explain consciousness, or why the same action, in the same parts of two different brains, shall lead in one case to murder, in another to the saving of life. The physical quantitative huckstering process is delusive when applied to the mind. Our success in life, our happiness, our moral state, cannot be measured by physical or chymical analysis, or by synthesis of the material elements composing our brain. It is impossible by any skill of man to explain the speciality of that internal action by which the same physical nutriment is perverted to desperate wickedness, or used to good-will, or becomes a power that makes for righteousness. View the whole as a Physician.

The physician must not so correlate vital and physical powers as to ignore the fact and speciality of life. Life lies in the organism, and translates physical energy into vital acts. Physical science assures us that there are many agents active around and within us, which, though they make themselves known by their ultimate effects, are not directly cognisable by eye or ear, by touch, or taste, or smell. The five senses do not reveal everything to us; and it is certain that manifold agencies, of which at present we know little or nothing, add to or take from our life-force. Great, therefore, is the error in the treatment of disease; when, in place

Speciality of Ailments.

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of conserving vital force, vital action is elicited. cesses of life may be changed, and seemingly for the better; but the patient is none the better, rather the worse. On the other hand, having lessened the force and frequency of vital functions, that are beyond the normal range; the result is evil. Stimulants are given to help a man through his work, and he has done things that otherwise he could not; but his life has been wasted; what he required was food and rest, a nourishing of organism, a building up of tissue, and restoration of energy.

The

Various ailments have their speciality indicating speciality of life. The most frequent cause of their occurrence, and the most potent elements in their eteology "lie in the working of those social, moral, and intellectual processes, which are unlike and apart from anything which can be even tortured into resemblance to the causes of disease in animals." cares of professional life, worry, excitement, luxurious idleness, the intellectually guided epicureanism of sensual excess, the urgent pressure of family and social needs, "the fierce conflict between moral sense and religious training, on the one hand, and doubtful practices and honest and dishonest scepticism, on the other, are the most fruitful causes of loss of rest, recourse to stimulants and narcotic drugs, failure of appetite, disturbed digestion, mal-assimilation, nervous breakdown, and all the thousand ills that flesh is heir to. I say designedly 'that flesh is heir to,' because I am now speaking of bodily ailment only, and affirm that this kind of causation of malady is peculiar to man, and that we lose sight of much it behoves us to consider if we fail to see the broad line of distinction which, in this particular, separates him from the animal kingdom to which he is allied." 1

"The inferences drawn from the phenomena of diseases apparently common to animals and men have been pushed too far. The differences between the human and the animal organization have been sometimes lost sight of." Variola

1 The Address in Medicine by Dr J. Russell Reynolds, forty-second meeting of the British Medical Association held at Norwich, 1874.

2 The Address in Medicine by Dr J. Russell Reynolds, forty-second meeting of the British Medical Association, held at Norwich, 1874.

and Vaccinia afford a striking illustration of the difference between human and animal organization. Many examples show that to infect human beings with virus from the animal world there must be the innoculation of its poison. The action of many drugs is different in animals to that which occurs in man. Mercury fails to increase the biliary secretion of dogs, and opium causes diarrhoea. The furnace of human life is filled with a different fluid, heated by a different fire, and moves a more complex machine, than does the furnace of brute life. The creations, renovations, transitions, and transmigrations are innumerable; yet individuality and identity are ever preserved.

Disturbances of the higher faculties of man exhibit many forms of disease from which members of the animal kingdom are exempt. Something like the cleverness and stupidity of men may be seen in our domesticated friends-" there is a disobedience almost human;" and sailors say "the monkey will not speak lest he should be set to work;" but insanity has never been observed in them, certainly not in the striking forms found by the physician who deals with human beings.

Not only should all the particulars which conduce to physical health be regarded; higher training or education requires equal or greater care. We recognise faculties in man, possessed by none other; mysterious windings of intellectual and moral being; powers, elsewhere only found in feeblest resemblance, fill him with joy, or cast into depths of despair, as he stands apart and alone in peculiar responsibility. Conscious of duty, and the necessity of self-sacrifice, he searches for the unseen, and looks to the future. He not merely floats or drifts on the stream of life, but controls weariness and dissatisfaction, as to the merely temporal, by a joyful belief in the Eternal. There are two worlds, and two lives he belongs to both, whether he will or not; he must not, cannot sink to the brute.

The science of life is the highest of all sciences. Obey no misdirection, make no failure. Dark shadows and fearful loss are the lot of some: whose memory is a field of sepulture filled with carcases of evil, and only evil continually; from the dust of their corruption evil spectres will come forth to walk here

after. The lives of wicked men project horrible wretchedness into the future; and we have fearful illustration of it in the dark shadows of present existence. Crime is developing a Cainite race. We recognise a law by which not only physical, moral taint cleaves to the children of evil-doers. The unclean thought of a polluted mind, as the disease of a pestilential body, extends its defilement even to those who are yet unborn; but the purity of the pure is a ministering angel to every life.

Few children of honest families take to theft: thieves, generally, are the descendants of thieves; of hereditary paupers and vagabonds; a race with physiological and pathological distinctions: one-third are diseased in mind, or body, or in both. Examine the heads of convicts, whether in prison or in the haunt of thieves at large, they are of brutal type: foreheads low and narrow, features coarse, and skulls, not of the high Aryan shape-but resembling the brute. Their likeness to one another, their unlikeness to the honest and pure, make known the fact-"Accumulated evil of generations has produced a low degenerate form of humanity." The clever-looking, bright, good-humoured thief? even this man is not only immoral-that is a matter of course; but often without the power of making moral distinctions. Take out those whom sudden and too great temptation has overcome, the perverted children of honest parents, the residuum is visibly brutish and bestial.

The following details, copied from the New York Times, appeared in many papers:-" Six convicts, all near relatives, were confined in the prison of Ulster County. The circumstance excited the attention of the United States Commissioner of Education, and he took the pains to trace back their genealogy to a single family of sisters, who had lived among the woods and fens, long ago, in that condition of squalid misery and crowded indecency in which too many young girls live in our courts and alleys. He went on to trace out the descendants of these sisters, so far as it could be made out; following up the fortunes of rather more than half the entire race, and the results are given as follows:-One girl grew up, as hundreds of such children are growing up through the