ways, and separated from the beast by a multiple many times more has his own speciality, his own individuality? That his life, as all life, is one of the great facts in God's Creation?

We exist instant by instant, but know not the rate of our progress, nor can we render it equable. Our individuality, our mind, are not, like the brain, prisoned in an "attic story;" but occupants of the entire animal organisation. Endless and distinct peculiarities of bodily and mental conformation constitute recesses, or inner pavilions of being, from which other men are excluded. Therein our peculiar faculties stretch out to the full some with inscriptions-as on a scroll; some transferred as by the statuary to a fair and ample surface of Parian marble; some by the artist to a picture, that they may abide for ever.

A few of us can pursue certain difficult complex speculations in peace, liable to no interior disturbance; others are exposed to gust and eddy from every ravine and temptation on the way of life. We know the aspect of idiocy, but who can tell why reason is unable to hold her seat? Less terrible is it to behold the body wasted, and features sharpened by the great life-struggle; than to look on the face whence mind is gone. Such a sight is a startling shock to the materialist. We cannot express all our thoughts and emotions, they need many voices and instruments to pour forth the full meaning; but every good man confesses-The renovation of my nature when brought about, will be effected in a manner bearing upon my peculiar condition as individually accountable. The Speciality of Human Life.

"The peak is high and flush'd

At his highest with sunrise fire;

The peak is high, and the stars are high,

And the thought of a man is higher."

Tennyson.

Human nature, in its present form, is only the rudimentary stage of an extended and more desirable existence. The future lies so involved in our bodily and mental organisation that we discern traces of it within our inner man. This inner man makes us somewhat like those poets of grand and

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comprehensive genius who unite the ideal and practical. Our mental and moral history far surpasses whatsoever may be accounted analogous in the natural instinct and material changes of the body; and exceeds everything that any combination of material forces can produce. A heathen could say " Aperta simplexque mens, nullâ re adjunctâ quæ sentire possit, fugere intelligentiæ nostræ vim et notionem videtur." 1 "There stir within us yearnings irrepressible, longings unutterable, a curiosity unsatisfied and insatiable by aught we see." These appetites, passions, and affections come, not as Socrates and Plato supposed, nor as our own poet, Wordsworth, sings, from the dim recollection of some former state of our being

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.

The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar."

Intimations of Immortality.

"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."

We may attain a similar thought by starting from a lower level: 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 saltsoperates 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; not only so, 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 1 Cicero, "De Nat. Deo," lib. x. c. II. 2 See Plato's "Meno." "Modern Science and Natural Religion:" Rev. C. Pritchard.

they appear. The mind, which, by use of a brain-brain shut within near and limited receptacle, discerns planets by calculation, and stars and constellations 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.

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, for the most part, 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, as so much combustible matter, in his stomach. It is dissolved by chemical 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 chemistry; is applied to the brain; and 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 brains of Marat, of Howard, of Napoleon, 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 process utterly fails as applied to the mind.

The molecular motion of the brain, linked to consciousness,

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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. Our success in life, our happiness, our moral state, cannot be measured by physical or chemical analysis, or by synthesis of the material elements composing our brain. It is impossible to explain, on mechanical principles, 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 should 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. The five senses do not reveal everything to us. It is certain that manifold agencies, of which at present we know little or nothing, add to or take from our life-force. Great is the error in treatment of disease when, in place of conserving vital force, vital action is elicited. The processes of life may be changed, seemingly for the better, but the patient is worse. 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. On the other hand, having lessened the force and frequency of vital functions that are beyond the normal range, the result is evil.

Various ailments have their speciality indicating speciality of life. The most frequent cause of their occurrence, and the most potent elements in their ætiology "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.

The

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 organisation have been sometimes lost sight of." Variola and Vaccinia afford a striking illustration of the difference between human and animal organisation. Many examples show that to infect human beings with virus from the animal world there must be the inoculation of its poison. The action of many drugs is different in animals to that which occurs in man. The furnace of human life is filled with a different fluid, heated by a different fire, moves a more complex machine, than does the furnace of brute life.

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." Some monkeys are perversely brutal, and nothing can be made of them; others of the same species are kind, full of fun, like their keepers, and can be taught tricks easily. 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 intel

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

2 Ibid.