TREATMENT OF INFLAMMATION. 133 



strate the insufficiency of the heart on the one hand 

 as it is on the other to exhibit in any of the vessels 

 of the circulating apparatus an auxiliary source of 

 power. But while admitting that the propulsion 

 and distribution of the blood are mechanical pro- 

 cesses, physiologists seem, by common consent, to 

 have referred to certain powers assumed to exist in 

 the capillary blood-vessels, the causation of all those 

 important functions which are evidently more or less 

 intimately connected with the blood's circulation. 



Now, why the chain of connection between this 

 motion of the blood as a cause, and the production 

 of these actions as effects, should be so abruptly 

 broken by the interposition of a mysterious mem- 

 brane operating by laws which we cannot under- 

 stand, inasmuch as they are totally different from 

 those regulating the interchange of fluids through 

 membrane, is a question which I have never been 

 able to answer to my own satisfaction. Nor can I 

 understand why mechanism should be supposed to 

 cease with the mere transmission of the blood. On 

 the contrary, it would seem much more consonant 

 with our general experience of the beautiful simpli- 

 city of Nature's arrangements to suppose that by 

 some skilful adaptation, some simple contrivance, the 

 force imparted to the mass of blood by the heart's 

 action, existing with that blood in every minute 

 vessel of the body, and thus constituting an infinitely 

 graduated, ubiquitous, and unceasing power, is the 

 immediate cause of many of those actions which have 

 hitherto been ascribed to occult and unintelligible 

 agencies. 



K 3 



