Human Physiology. 



We suffer physical pain, and also moral disorder and its pain, 

 from the mistakes and wrong-doings of our progenitors. The 

 dread, or anticipation, or prophetic intuition of coming evil 

 gives us pain. A thorny hedge of pain and misery surrounds 

 us, and its purpose can only be to keep us in the path of peace. 

 All pain must be for the general good and there may be com- 

 pensations which will make all pain a blessing to the individual 

 sufferer; but pain and evil are mysteries which, in this life, we 

 cannot penetrate, but which, we may hope, will be clear to us 

 in the future. The mysteries of life, insoluble here, prove that 

 there must be a hereafter. 



Disease, we are told, is a unit. It is a diminution of the 

 vital force, or nervous power of the system, one school of 

 Pathologists contends. Another holds that the blood is the 

 life, and impurity in the blood is the cause of all diseased 

 action. But good blood cannot be formed without sufficient 

 vital force or nervous power; and good blood is necessary to 

 the healthy action of the brain and nervous system. Here is 

 reciprocal action, each depending upon the other. Must there 

 not be something higher than either behind them both? The 

 humoral pathologists who find matter of disease, or diseasing 

 matter, in the system, poisoning the blood, deranging nervous 

 action, and producing morbid conditions in all the organs of 

 the body, are certainly right. Waste matter, retained in the 

 system, is a mater ies morbi, and there are many kinds of blood- 

 poisoning. As health is force, activity, the harmonious action 

 of all the functions, giving pleasure and enjoyment of life, 

 disease is weakness, languor, disordered functions, excessive or 

 diminished action, giving pain and misery. Health is the 

 orderly growth and maintenance of the physical and mental 

 powers; disease is their disorderly action, or paralysis, or 

 decay. 



The nosology, or classification and naming of diseases, now 

 in vogue, is convenient, and relates them to their causes. The 



