150 ASSIMILATION AND ITS ORGANS. 



step of the alimentary tube has its distinct food; and let us be sure 

 that these great varieties are necessary to the maintenance of the 

 human blood, that the spirit may come down into the world thereby, 

 through its own mysterious process of avatars and incarnations. 



But in this extensive system, for aught that we have hitherto 

 said, the parts might be deficient in unity, and want active combi- 

 nation. Have we then left out no fact in our treatment of these 

 straggling organs? Undoubtedly, for we have said nothing of the 

 motion that we feel pervading the belly, and whose use should be 

 as palpable as its existence : we have taken no account of the alter- 

 nate movements of the lungs, "which press and actuate the inferior 

 viscera as the atmospheres press and actuate the earth." Now the 

 grand effects of the body depend upon this actuation of the lungs : 

 it is the source of mechanical power to the whole of the organs. 

 This is manifest in the alimentary tube. When portions of this 

 tube are exposed to sight, or removed from the rest, they still ex- 

 hibit a creeping or peristaltic motion. This is their last individual 

 effort, when they have lost the support of the neighboring organs, 

 and the fulcrum of the skin and muscles ; and it is vague and inde- 

 terminate. They still indeed move for a brief space, though no 

 lungs draw them, because everything in the body is constructed to 

 do of itself, as far as may be, whatever other parts do for it ; so little 

 is man's work physical, and so helpful are all things to all things. 

 But this individual life, though it exists, cannot of itself maintain 

 itself. Before, however, the machine is broken into, the movement 

 of these parts is rhythmical and exact, chiming with the motions of 

 the breath. For the gullet runs down through the lungs, and 

 necessarily obeys their attractions, and as necessarily rolls onward 

 its motion to the subsequent structures. As for the stomach and 

 abdominal organs, we know by touch that they are subject to recip- 

 rocal breathings coming down from above. The same is the case 

 with the lacteals and the thoracic duct, which latter runs up, as the 

 gullet down, through the active space of the chest — the air-pump 

 of the frame. Thus the digestive series, from the mouth of the lips 

 to the mouth of the subclavian vein, and including the myriads of 

 mouths between the two, eats and drinks (for the two are no longer 

 two in assimilation) in alternate moments, as the lungs draw in 



