NATURAL THEOLOGY. 199 



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 liver 

 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 correla- 

 tion of the sides is externally preserved through- 

 out the whole 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 ad- 

 justment, by mutual compensation, of anomalous 

 forms into a regular congeries? — the effect, in a 

 word, of artful, and if we might be permitted to 

 speak, of studied collocation ? 



3. Similar also to this is the third observation : 

 that an internal inequality in the feeding vessels is 



