80 OF THE MUSCLES. 



persons have availed themselves of this circamstance to 

 teach the deaf to speak, and to understand what is said by 

 others. In the some person, and after his habit of speak- 

 ing is formed, one, and only one, position of the parts, will 

 produce a given articulate sound correctly. How instan- 

 taneously are these positions assumed and dismissed ; 

 how numerous are the permutations, how various, yet how 

 infallible! Arbitrary and antic variety is not the thing we 

 admire ; but variety obeying a rule, conducing to an effect, 

 and commensurate with exigences infinitely diversified. I 

 believe also that the anatomy of the tongue corresponds 

 with these observations upon its activity. The muscles of 

 the tongue are so numerous and so implicated with one 

 another, that they cannot be traced by the nicest dissec- 

 tion ; nevertheless, which is a great perfection of the organ, 

 neither the number, nor the complexity, nor what might 

 seem to be, the entanglement of its fibres, in any wise im- 

 pedes its motion, or renders the determination or success of 

 its efforts uncertain. 



I here entreat the reader's permission to step a little out 

 of my way to consider the parts of the mouth in some of 

 their other properties. It has been said, and that by an 

 eminent physiologist, that, whenever nature attempts to 

 work two or more purposes by one instrument, she does 

 both or all imperfectly. Is this true of the tongue, regard- 

 ed as an instrument of speech, and of taste ; or regarded 

 as an instrument of speech, of taste and of deglutition? 

 So much otherwise, that many persons, that is to say, nine 

 hundred and ninety-nine persons out of a thousand, by the 

 instrumentality of this one organ, talk, and taste, and swal- 

 low, very well. In fact the constant warmth and moisture 

 of the tongue, the thinness of the skin, the papillae upon 

 its surface, qualify this organ for its office of tasting, as 

 much as its inextricable multiplicity of fibres do for the 

 rapid movements which are necessary to speech. Animals 

 which feed upon grass, have their tongues covered with a, 

 perforated skin so as to admit the dissolved food to the pa- 

 pilliE underneath, which, in the mean time, remain defend- 

 ed from the rough action of the unbruised spicula^.* 



■ PapillcB are small bodies situated on the surface and sides of the 

 tongue ; they are furnished by the extreme filaments of the gustatory 

 nerve, through which medium we acquire tlie sense of tasting. In 



