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POPULAR SCIENCE REVIEW. 
THE SKIN. 
BY ISAAC ASHE, M.B., CH. H. 
I T is a characteristic difference between the works of man and 
the works of the Creator that the former has to adopt many 
contrivances, and employ a cumbrous machinery, to bring about 
a single result, whereas the Creator generally accomplishes 
several ends by one and the same agent ; and in few organs of 
the body, or in none, perhaps, is this more manifest, than in that 
one of which we are about to present to our readers a brief 
sketch. 
We little think when we look at the Skin of our bodies, 
apparently so simple, ivhat a wonderfully complex structure it 
really possesses, or how numerous, how varied and important, 
are the uses it serves in our animal economy. 
Our readers would, perhaps, be startled to hear that our 
stomach, our liver, nay, even our brain itself, are less necessary 
to life than our skin. Yet it is well known that we may do 
without food, live without calling our stomach into action, for 
several days; that the liver also may wholly cease to act for several 
days before death ensues; and it has also been known that 
several monsters have been born without any brain whatever, 
which yet have survived for several days, discharging all the 
functions of organic life, — exercising motion, sucking at the 
breast like other infants, digesting then- food, &c., — and have 
continued so to do for a number of days greater than the number 
of hours it would be possible to survive were the functions of 
the skin completely stopped. The experiment has actually been 
made on the lower animals, and the results show that the skin 
is a most important auxiliary to the lungs in the process of 
aeration of the blood ; and that if its functions be arrested, as 
has been done by varnishing the fur in a rabbit, or gilding the 
skin in a pig, the unfortunate animal dies in a couple of hours 
or so, with all the symptoms which would be produced by a 
slow cutting off of the supply of air to the lungs. On one occa- 
sion, before this fact was known, the experiment was unfortu- 
nately performed on a child, and with a like fatal result. This 
was on the occasion of the accession of Leo the Tenth to the 
Papal chaff, when he gilded a child all over at Florence to repre- 
sent the Golden Age ; but the unfortunate child died in a few 
hours very unexpectedly, representing, we suppose, the short 
