THE GENERAL STUUCTURE. 129 



2 The next circumstance to be remarked is, that while 

 the cavities of the body are so configurated as externally to 

 exhibit the most exact correspondency of the opposite sides, 

 the contents of these cavities have no such correspondency. 

 A line drawn down the middle of the breast divides the 

 thorax into two sides exactly similar ; yet these two sides 

 enclose very different contents. The heart lies on the left 

 side, a lobe of the lungs on the right ; balancing each other 

 neither in size nor shape. The same thing holds of the 

 abdomen. The hver lies on the right side, without any 

 similar viscus opposed to it on the left. The spleen indeed 

 is situated over against the liver; but agreeing with the 

 liver neither in bulk nor form. There is no equipollency 

 between these. The stomach is a vessel both irregular in 

 its shape and oblique in its position. The foldings and 

 doublings of the intestines do not present a parity of sides. 

 Yet that symmetry which depends upon the correlation of 

 the sides is externally preserved througliout the Avhole trunk, 

 and is the more remarkable in the lower parts of it, as the 

 integuments are soft, and the shape, consequently, is not, as 

 the thorax is, by its ribs, reduced by natural stays. It is 

 evident, therefore, that the external proportion does not arise 

 from any equality in the shape or pressure of the internal 

 contents. What is it, indeed, but a correction of inequalities ; 

 an adjustment, by mutual compensation, of anomalous forms 

 into a regular congeries ; the effect, in a word, of artful, 

 and if we might be permitted so to speak, of studied collo- 

 cation ? 



3. {:5imilar also to this is the third observation : that an 

 mternal inequality in the feeding vessel is so managed as to 

 produce no inequahty of parts which were intended to cor- 

 respond. The right arm answers accurately to the left, both 

 in size and shape ; but the arterial branches which supply 

 the two arms do not go off from their trunk in a pair, in the 

 same manner, at the same place, or at the same angle. 

 Under which want of similitude, it is very difficult to con 



