1-50 ^LIRITIO.N. 



SO close is the bearing of the one upon the other that without it it could 

 not exist. Breathing by means of an elastic fluid surrounding us, and 

 life, were nearly or quite synonomous. Whilst breath — to use an ordi- 

 nary mode of speaking — continues, there is life; when breathing ceases, 

 death ensues. When the breath has gone out of a man, according to 

 the vulgar mode of speaking, the vital spark has fled, and over his once 

 active and animated frame reigns universal and irremediable paralysis. — 

 When man was formed of the dust of the earth, he was at first but a 

 statue wonderfully constructed, but lifeless and voiceless ; but when the 

 Almighty Creator whose plastic hand had framed him, breathed into his 

 nostrils the breath of life, then he became a living soul. And as breath- 

 ing gave motion to his blood, and fitted it to support his frame, waked 

 up the nervous energy of his system, and rendered his spirit receptive 

 of impressions through the quickened senses of its clay vehicle, so it 

 is the same that upholds all these phenomena as long as they appear. 



But although this was known, known to every body, to the savage 

 as well as to the philosopher, what did they know more than the sim- 

 ple fact? Nothing — absolutely nothing. That they attempted to know 

 more, we are aware, but their speculations were fruitless, and when in 

 their results compared with the approximations to the truth characteris- 

 tic of a later, of a recent age, they appear to us, as they are, ineffably 

 absurd. 



If we look at the philosophy of breathing as exhibited in the pages 

 of ancient writers, it wuU be evident that they were as wide of the mark 

 as possible. The great Plato, who was so unrivaled in his capacity to 

 dress up his thougths in splendid language, and to throw over them the 

 drapery of the finest rhetoric, in his great work on the Creation, the 

 Timaeus, tells us very gravely, that the lungs are a kind of auxiliary to 

 the heart. They are soft and bloodless, they are like a sponge, perfo- 

 rated with holes, they are recipient of air and drink — their design is to 

 cool the heart from too great heat, and placed around this organ, they 

 are «/,«.£< jm,64Akjc<sv, and they assuage anger. 



In an interesting work of the celebrated German Reformer, Melanch- 

 thon, entitled Dc Jhii?ua, he discourses thus about the lungs. They af- 

 ford two advantages to the heart, one is to carry to it air, to refrigerate it 

 and the spirits, but they prepare the air first, they temper it, or it would 

 injure, they give an opportunity of exhaling fumes, which, not thus elim- 

 inated, would oppress it. They are large in order to contain a suff^icient 

 quantity of air to admit of the temporary suspension of breathing. Just 

 before the Lavoiserian Chemistry look the field, the views of physiolo- 

 gists seemed to be that there was some chemical change not well un- 



