PREFACE. 



At the end of a work, an author writes the preface or beginning, 

 unable to neglect the law which urges that extremes shall meet. 

 Prefaces need no apology, and a reader intending to study a book, 

 does not do himself justice unless he peruses them. A preface gives 

 the author's last conception of his aim — the most comprehensive 

 eye with which he see it. And unless the reader looks through this 

 eye, he cannot enter into the author's mind. The study of a book 

 is the temporary putting on of the faculties and insights of another ; 

 and the sooner the assumption takes place, the sooner the reader be- 

 gins to read aright. 



To assist this we have a few remarks to make that may prepare 

 in some measure for the following pages. 



We labor under difficulty in procuring the right audience for the 

 present discourse. The subject of which it treats has been so much 

 narrowed to a class, that on the one hand that class, the medical 

 profession, claims it as an exclusive knowledge; and on the other 

 hand, the public mind is in abeyance with regard to it, and looks 

 upon it as a property for ever alienated from its possession. We 

 therefore run the risk of finding no readers, unless we can persuade 

 the public that the knowledge of the human body belongs to every 

 man, woman and child, and has no more necessary connection with 

 physic, than with art, industry, philosophy, divinity, or any of the 

 other occupations that we do in the body, and by the body. To 

 write a treatise on the subject through which this persuasion shall 

 run with vigorous consequences, has been a leading motive with us 

 in the present work. 



Persons for the most part have no idea that the sciences belong to 

 the great world in the first place, and that the classes who are active- 

 ly cultivating them, are but little bands of pioneers, that are con- 



