THE SKIN. 
335 
duration of the age in question, and causing no little astonish- 
ment and speculation among philosophers, and probably no less 
superstitious feeling in the minds of the vulgar. 
From these experiments we can easily infer how important a 
matter it must be to keep this organ constantly in an efficient 
state for the discharge of this as well as its other important 
functions. Indeed, this one organ the Creator has put specially 
into our charge, while all the other organs of our body are 
beyond our control. Yet often when we have neglected this 
charge, and suffer in consequence, we lay the blame upon organs 
wholly guiltless of our sufferings, such as the liver or stomach, 
which will work perfectly right without our care or attention, if 
we only give them fair play, and do not, by our neglect of the 
skin, throw upon them an amount of work twice as great as 
their proper share. 
In insects, the entire respiration is conducted by means of 
pores in the skin, to which the name of spiracles is given, and 
of internal tubes called trachece, and they possess neither lungs 
nor gills. Hence arises the difficulty of drowning an insect in 
water ; for as the pores are guarded by minute hairs, the water 
cannot enter them : but if a feather dipped in oil be applied to 
the abdominal portion of an insect’s body, as to the yellow part 
of a wasp, it falls dead immediately ; being, in fact, suffocated 
by the oil, which readily enters the pores in spite of the hairs, 
and so stops the respiration. 
Aeration of the blood is not, however, the only function which 
the skin has to discharge ; absorption is another, though not of 
equal importance. This is carried on by a system of vessels 
called the lymphatic vessels, which permeate the skin everywhere 
over the whole surface of the body. To illustrate this function, 
wc may mention the fact, that persons in whom disease has 
closed up the natural entrance to the stomach by the throat 
have been kept alive for days and weeks by being frequently 
immersed in a warm milk bath. The late celebrated Due de 
Pasquier, who died a short time ago at the age of ninety, had 
been kept alive for some weeks before his death by this means. 
Various salts, also, have been detected in the secretions of 
persons who have used baths containing those salts in solution, 
such salts having been taken up by the skin. Persons in dis- 
tress for want of water at sea have also sometimes relieved their 
thirst by bathing the body in sea- water, so rapidly is absorption 
carried on under such circumstances. 
Another and a most important function of the skin it dis- 
charges as the organ of the special sense of touch, which is only 
a highly exalted form of general sensation, which also resides 
specially in the skin. Under certain circumstances the re- 
ference of sensation to the part of the body touched becomes 
