2 LECTURES ON HORSES. 



animal machine. Simple and uniform, and beautiful in appear- 

 ance, as are the exteriors of Nature's organic creations, their in- 

 teriors are in truth, in the sublime language of the psalmist, 



" Fearfully and wonderfully made !" 



Such is the complexity and intricacy of the animal fabric, that, 

 notwithstanding men of the greatest sagacity and spirit of research 

 have, from the earliest ages, laboured in developing and explain- 

 ing it, there still remain parts of the body whose structure is 

 concealed in mystery ; and as for the connexion subsisting be- 

 tween body and mind, anatomists and physiologists of the present 

 day are hardly more informed than were the metaphysicians of 

 former ages. 



" Through the dis-closing deep 

 Light my blind way : The mineral strata there 

 Thrust blooming. Thence the vegetable world, 

 O'er that the rising system more complex 

 Of animals, and higher still the mind." 



Whenever a man has elaborated any complex or delicate piece 

 of machinery, in order to preserve it he incloses it in some sort of 

 case : in this he does but imitate Nature, who has furnished all 

 her organic productions with complete tunics or cases— some of one 

 kind, some of another, but all pleasing to view, and most completely 

 effectual for the purpose of protection against such external agency 

 as must of necessity be encountered. This covering — commonly 

 called skin — is that which composes the exterior of the animal. But 

 Nature does not stop here. In addition to a skin she has given a 

 sort of clothing to animals: some she has covered with scales, some 

 with feathers, some with wool, some with hair. From the ob- 

 servations Lord Byron made in the course of his travels and resi- 

 dences abroad, he was led to believe that even the hair of the 

 head of a woman, if suffered to grow to its natural length, would 

 in time serve as a vesture for her body. Man, in a savage un- 

 clothed state, would no doubt appear in some such natural pilous 

 garb as that in which Orson is pictorially represented. 



There is not only a difference in the material furnished by Na- 



