77 



connects the child with the man, it must be complete 

 in every link, though many may appear to be hidden 

 from the sight. 



These are but a few very few, of the marvels 

 connected with man's nature. His structure seems 

 to incarnate positive contradictions. His frame is a 

 reservoir of different and conflicting forces. It is a 

 mighty apparatus which knows no rest, yet exhibits 

 no turmoil or confusion. We sit by the side of a 

 human being, and all is calm, and seemingly motion- 

 less. It is just as if you listened at the door of an 

 immense mill, where hundreds of processes were in 

 progress, and yet could not catch one sound, or dis- 

 cern one symptom, of internal activity. That the 

 man himself who is the scene of all these numerous 

 operations should yet be almost unconscious of their 

 existence, is one of the most striking and merciful 

 paradoxes which could have been devised. And 

 think, too, how strange that these vital movements 

 should be kept up year after year, though the primi- 

 tive impulse must long ago have been exhausted by 

 the resistance which it continually encounters. 

 Man being the nearest approach to a purely perpet- 

 ual motion, since, spite of that resistance, his heart 

 beats in his breast for seventy or eighty years, and 

 at the rate of some forty millions of strokes per an- 

 num, without a single hour's holiday. Wake in the 

 night, and still you find the trusty servant at work, 

 beat, beat, beating. Whilst the mind seems to slum- 

 ber, and the limbs to recruit, still the noble engine 

 proceeds with its steady strokes. Through youth 



