268 THE HUMAN SKIN. 



she becomes, is the roomier in accommodation for her essences, 

 which are only represented in the fluids. It is abusing the micro- 

 scope to imagine that it can sound the depth of any structure : 

 honest sight is deeper than the microscope j for we see on the broad 

 canvas of space, effects which point to properties that no lens can 

 verify. 



But the truth is that nature is more considerate than our science, 

 and she places somewhere in every system one or more big facts to 

 show her designs. These are her maternal "great A and bouncing 

 B," her picturesque alphabet, intended to be learnt by implicit 

 rote before anything else. Too often however we begin at the end 

 of her grammar, and never find this alphabet j and can but timidly 

 copy her forms, without the power to spell much less to read them. 

 Now what is the largest pore in the skin ? Without hesitation, 

 the mouth, which shows us, by an unmicroscopic exhibition, that 

 the whole skin feeds upon terrestrial elements, solid and fluid. 

 What are the next pores? Plainly the nostrils and ears, the 

 purveyors of the atmosphere and its motions. And what do these 

 cutaneous orifices declare but the universal aeration of the body by 

 the surface in which they are constituted ? But is there an opening 

 for the ether ? Undoubtedly two — in the eyes, where the mind 

 stands face to face with the world, and the world with the mind. 

 This is sight, which permeates the closed windows of the cornea, and 

 sees that there are pores above the microscope, and that the universe 

 can come in to us when the doors are shut. Those ether wells, the 

 eyes, are the naked truths of a whole humanity of similar orifices 

 whose lids conceal them in other parts of the skin. If these deduc- 

 tions be too strange, we ask then, do not we interpret other things 

 by their leading facts ? And what is our knowledge of the world 

 but the knowledge of its faces and its heads ? 



But upon this subject of the appropriations of the skin, we cau- 

 tion ourselves that the life of each part seeks and takes the kinsmen 

 of the part, and no other things. The lungs or air organs breathe 

 air, gas, whatever ascends from the solid into the void, or tends to 

 enlarge itself or to breathe. The stomach eats whatever is eatable ; 

 it fructifies fruit of every order, or puts the material finish to that 

 process by which nature is eaten and digested until it comes up to 



