1872.1 337 [Price. 
—you must carry the comparison to include both operator and sender of 
messages ; must note that in the centre is the mind that thinks, and that 
receives, and sends the messages, and commands and executes as well. 
There is still the mastery of mind, ever asserting her power over matter, 
and her own likeness unto God. And though so small a speck, there is 
nothing known to man that will so bear to be put in comparison with our 
conception of Deity, who is a spirit, as the immaterial mind of man. 
It is not to be doubted, after the experiments and observations of Prof. 
Matteucci and Drs. Du Bois-Reymond, Carpenter and Radcliffe, that 
electricity pervades the nerves and muscles of the body ; the precise ser- 
vice of which awaits further development, but is supposed to be identified 
with the ordinary force and action of the nerve and muscle. Dr. Rad- 
cliffe says, as the result of his investigations, ‘‘ There is reason to believe 
that all kinds of electricity act upon nerve and muscle by way of charge 
and discharge, the charge antagonizing, the discharge permitting, the 
state of action.’? Whatever may be further ascertained as to the agency 
of electricity in the animal economy, of this we may be assured, that it 
will act subserviently to life and to the will. So it is found in the electri- 
cal cel and the torpedo fish, in which life largely accumulates it, and the 
will discharges it upon an enemy, in electric shocks, but only so long as 
the supply lasts, when the belligerent thus armed must await renewal of 
supply by natural recuperation. With all animate creatures rest after 
fatigue is the appointed means for renewal of strength to muscle and 
nerve, to become fitter instruments of the will; and that is to say, after 
the exacting will has ceased to enforce wasteful action, the life process 
works on during reposé to restore the strength, and the more perfectly if 
wesleep. The strength or electricity would not be given us without the 
life gave it, and neither is to be identified with the life, or mind, or will. 
I suppose there are few of active mind who have not the consciousness, 
when going to sleep, of those sudden nervous throbs that tell us that a dis- 
turbed electricity is seeking its equilibrium in the body, and thus several 
times defeating the desire to sleep. This occurs at the moment of dblivi- 
ousness ; Showing that the mind had until then restrained electrical action ; 
put which ensues as a physical action in the body, as soon as the atid 
ceases torule. Many materials concur to build the human temple and to 
subserve the life. The blood alone has its more than dozen elements ; its 
water, albumen, fibrin, sodium, lime, magnesia, iron, &e.; and heat and 
electricity may warm the body, and aid the vital functions, yet be not mind, 
And our minds 
‘* Are not wholly brain, 
Magnetic mockeries;’?’ * * * 
‘¢ Not only cunning casts in clay : 
Let science prove we are, and then 
What matters science unto men?” 
—Tennyson. 
Prove man is worthless, then is science worthless all. 
One so practical and learned as Dr. Carpenter, and so fully informed 
upon the results of modern scientifie investigation, and himself writing 
as a life-long teacher of physiology, regards the brain as the instrument 
