21 S Medicine, 



living bodies must be allowed to possess great im* 

 portance; and the review of its progress during an 

 hundred years of more industry and enterprize in 

 the pursuit of natural knowledge than the world 

 has ever witnessed before, will be supposed to 

 present difficulties proportioned to the extent and 

 complexity of the subject. 



To such as feel a genuine attachment to the 

 Science of nature, few subjects present inquiries 

 of a more interesting and instructive kind. When 

 improved as far as the state of the other cotempo- 

 rary sciences will admit, it will be found to exhibit 

 a systematic result of all the experiments and ob- 

 servations; facts and principles, which serve to ex- 

 plain and illustrate the phenomena of animated 

 nature. And when it shall reach that point of 

 advancement to which a cautious estimate of the 

 powders of the human mind may suppose it to pro- 

 ceed, it wall probably be enabled to diffiise lights 

 and suggest imiprovements far beyond the most 

 sanguine expectations of the naturalists of the pre- 

 sent day. In zoology, botany, anatomy, and the 

 theory and practice of physic, these good effects 

 may be confidently anticipated. 



As all living bodies are subjects of physiological 

 inquiry, and as by living bodies are here meant all 

 those which are enabled, by a certain organized 

 structure, to grow and to propagate their kind, it 

 is plain that physiology must extend to the whole 

 of that organical economy in anim.als and plants 

 which the author of nature has contrived for the 

 preservation of the individual, and the continu- 

 ance and propagation of the species. But al- 

 though it is not intended, in this brief retrospect, 

 wholly to overlook the history of the doctrines of 

 general physiology for the late century, it may be 

 proper to apprize the reader that the objects of 

 human physiology wdll chiefly claim attention. 



