THE TRANSPIRATIONS. 263 



analysis bath seen, notwithstanding that they are irresistible min- 

 isters of disease and death ? What are those odors proceeding 

 from the skin, by which the exorbitant sense of the wild Indian 

 tracks the footsteps of his victim over the long flight of a diversi- 

 fied country ? What aroma shed upon the earth, and stiffer than 

 the sweeping wind, is the guide of the bloodhound and other 

 instinctive hunters, to the distant quarry which they seek ? The 

 footprints of the skin, have they not modified by subtle sheddings 

 the very ground and stones where the tread has been ? And how 

 far, and how long, does the magic work from those scheming life- 

 like centres ? Nay more, we appeal to mesmerism, and we ask what 

 it is, proceeding from the operator's body to the patient, that spell- 

 binds every sense, or produces the play whereby the automaton 

 sleeper is set in motion, and set in thought, at the bidding of an- 

 other's brain. Clearly it is no perspiration in an ordinary sense ; 

 it takes effect through obstacles too great ; yet as clearly it proceeds 

 from the surface of one frame, and is received by the surface of 

 another j in short, it goes from skin to skin. These facts conclude, 

 that through certain channels occult to the microscope, quite un- 

 known to anatomy, but assured by our babe and suckling common 

 sense, the skin, or the nervous system through it, pours forth a sub- 

 tle radiation of tremendous efficacy on other organic creatures. 

 They render it evident that through this battery of surfaces, the 

 animal creation, and man most of all, is constantly impressing a 

 character upon external nature, literally magnetizing it, and produc- 

 ing we know not what modifications and new forms in its plastic 

 matrices. It were foolish to suppose that emanations which en- 

 gender such changes in those delicate tests, organic beings, have 

 been powerless to alter dead things in the ages that have elapsed 

 since first organic life, bent thenceforth upon multiplication and 

 dominion, sprang from the seminary of the original earth. Led 

 in this train of thought, philosophers have suspected, that the tigers, 

 lions and snakes, and other ugly foes not seemingly of our house- 

 hold, were at first but the wind-cast seedlings of our passions, 

 wicked words overheard and dramatized by nature, returning now 

 from we know not whither to plague the inventors ; though doubt- 

 less men will be slow to own such children as these. 



