ESSENTIALNESS OF THE HEART. 177 



This theme requires to be dwelt upon from the currenf misappre- ' 

 hensions respecting it. For at present it is held, that that which is 

 essential in the human body is that which the body possesses in 

 common with hydatids and zoophytes — that a digestive sac or cell 

 is the essence of mankind. And the reason given is, that all but 

 stomach and nutrition can be dispensed with, and that these can go on 

 for a time on their own account without the brain and nerves. It is 

 perfectly true that these foundations are as independent as they can be, 

 and that they are automatic. The very flesh is alive perse, and carnally 

 ensouled, before the better life is added to it by the brain. But in 

 developments the development becomes everything, and covers and 

 gradually buries the matrix out of which it sprang. And if the 

 development does not come, the barren matrix cannot last or work. 

 No one ever heard of an acephalous monster going to church or 

 taking a hand at whist; on the other hand, it is walked out of the 

 ranks sexlessly and shabbily into the unconsecrated piece of the next 

 churchyard. And all headless things which come up among those 

 which have heads, must take the same fate; headless sciences among 

 the rest. Moral headlessness is in the same category; those who 

 make the belly and the flesh essential because they are the last 

 things that can be done without, and throw away the higher parts 

 because they are merely additions, and some function continues 

 without them, go to the worms by their own claims. For just that 

 which is first and easiest lost and lived without, is the pearl of the 

 human mind. 



To return from this digression. At one end of the circulatory 

 system is the heart; at the other a class of vessels termed, from 

 their hair-like fineness, the capillaries. The heart, as we before 

 observed, sends from its left ventricle a grand arterial arch, the aorta, 

 which in its turn produces stems, branches and twigs, and these last 

 the capillary tubes, an intermediate field, which is the end of the 

 arteries and the beginning of the veins. In these almost invisible 

 capillaries, nature, "greatest in the least things," carries on some of 

 her most wonderful operations. The blood which in the larger arte- 

 ries is a medley volume of red globules floating in serum, and only 

 comes into indiscriminate contact with the sides of the vessels, as it 

 runs down from the larger into the lesser tubes, becomes more and 



