222 THE MICROSCOPE AND ITS LESSONS. 



and empty cysts you see on our object were those which, 

 first attacked the muscle, between the voluntary fibre of 

 which you see they are concealed. Those which come 

 more clearly into view, are those which produced his 

 death. My friend tells me that the subject from which 

 he made this preparation was a German who had been in 

 England twenty years; he had been ill on several occasions, 

 and had been in the habit of receiving sausage-meat from 

 his relations in Germany, which was no doubt the means 

 by which he was trichinised, as on several occasions after 

 eating it he was taken ill, but never bad enough to be 

 laid up, the illness passing off as an attack of ordinary 

 diarrhoea, calling for no medical assistance. I have told 

 you his death was occasioned by what at first appeared to 

 be a fit of some kind. On a post-mortem examination 

 being made, his muscles were found to be filled with 

 trichinae in most extraordinary numbers ; on a moderate 

 calculation, his body was supposed to have contained 

 between fifty and sixty millions of these parasites. 



I might thus entertain no, don't say "frighten" you 

 with other illustrations of the human body, in health and 

 disease ; but perhaps you may exclaim, " Hold, enough ! " 

 And so we will leave the investigation of bone and sinew, 

 and teeth and nail, and other of the many complicated 

 parts of the wonderful house we live in ; and I can only 

 hope to have sharpened the edge of your intellectual 

 appetite, and to send you to other and better guides for 

 increased instruction ; but you will read and study in vain 

 unless you can endorse Thomas Carlyle's words, that 

 man's twofold nature is reflected in history. He is of 

 earth, but his thoughts are with the stars. Mean and 

 petty too oft his wants and bis desires are ; yet they serve 

 a soul exalted with grand, glorious aims, with immortal 

 longings, with thoughts which sweep the heavens, and 



