which preside in the ner- 

 ture of the principle that 

 animates it. Is there not something profoundly impressive in this, 

 that the human mind can look from without" upon itself, as one 

 looks at his phantom image in a mirror, and discern its own linea- 

 ments and admire its own movements. My own thoughts have 

 of late years been forcibly drawn to this, from a recognition that 

 the interpretation by the mind of impressions from without takes 

 place under mathematical laws, as for instance, that when exter- 

 nal ethereal vibrations create in the mind a certain idea, that 

 same idea will arise when the vibrations are doubled, or tripled, 

 or quadrupled in frequency; but other ideas will be engendered 

 by vibrations of an intermediate rate. Yet what these ideas will 

 be may be predicted. It is true that this is only an optical case, 

 but it extends the view that has been offered to us by a study of 

 the structure of the ear. In the labyrinthine compartment of that 

 organ the ultimate fibers of the auditory nerve are laid on the 

 win. line- plane of the spiral lamina, in ever-decreasing lengths, 

 each capable of trembling to the sound which is in unison with it 

 — a mechanical action truly, answering to the sympathetic vibra- 

 tion with which the strings of a piano will respond to the corre- 

 sponding notes of a flute — and these are translated by the mind 

 into all the utterances of articulate speech, all the harmonies of 

 music— speech that engenders new ideas within us, strains which, 

 though they may die away in the air, live forever in the memory. 

 The exquisite delight we experience in listening to the works of 

 our great composers arises thus in mechanical movements, which 

 are the issue of mathematical combinations. The unseen world is 

 under the influence of number ! 



But what is number except there be one who numbers ? When 

 Pompey, in his Syrian war, broke into the holy of holies at 

 Jerusalem, he expressed, as Tacitus tells us, his astonishment that 

 there was no image of a Divinity within; the shrine was silent 

 and empty. And so, though after death we may anatomize and 

 explore the inmost recesses of the braid, the rafted Genius that 

 once presided there lr - not left so much as a 



phantom trace, a shadow of himself. 



The experiments of Galvani and Volta have not yet reached 

 their conclusion; those of Faraday and Du Bois Beymond have 

 only yielded a preliminary suggestion as to the nervous force. 

 Excepting the great sympathetic nerve, the nervous fibers them- 

 selves are, as is well-known, of two classes-those that gather the 

 impressions of external things and convey them to the nerve-cen- 

 ters, and tl. the will from within 

 outwardly. The capabilities of one of the former— the apparatus 

 for sight— have been greatly improved by various optical con- 

 trivances, such as microscopes and telescopes, an earnest of what 

 may hereafter be done as respects the four other special organs of 

 sense; and m ■ "<--. the result of mental ope- 

 rations, the resolves of the will, may be transmitted with greater 



