NATURAL THEOLOGY. 211 



sive. If they be made supportable by habit, it is 

 all which habit can do ; they never become agree- 

 ble. If this sense, therefore, be acquired, it is a 

 result ; the produce of numerous and complicated 

 actions of external objects upon the senses, and of 

 the mind upon its sensations. With this result, 

 there must be a certain congruity to enable any 

 particular object to please ; and that congruity, we 

 contend, is consulted in the aspect which is given 

 to animal and vegetable bodies. 



IV. The skin and covering of animals is that 

 upon which their appearance chiefly depends ; and 

 it is that part which, perhaps, in all animals, is most 

 decorated, and most free from impurities. But 

 were beauty, or agreeableness of aspect, entirely 

 out of the question, there is another purpose an- 

 swered by this integument, and by the collocation 

 of the parts of the body beneath it, which is of still 

 greater importance ; and that purpose is conceal- 

 ment. Were it possible to view through the skin 

 the mechanism of our bodies, the sight would fright- 

 en us out of our v/its. " Durst we make a single 

 movement," asks a lively French writer, " or stir a 

 step from the place we were in, if we saw our blood 

 circulating, the tendons pulling, the lungs blowing, 

 the humours filtrating, and all the incomprehensi- 

 ble assemblage of fibres, tubes, pumps, valves, cur- 

 rents, pivots, which sustain an existence at once so 

 frail and so presumptuous ?" 



V. Of animal bodies, considered as masses, there 

 is another property, more curious than it is gene- 



