80 
OF THE MUSCLES. 
persons have availed themselves of this circumstance to 
teach the deaf to speak, and to understand what is said by 
others. In the same person, and after his habit of speak¬ 
ing is formed, one, and only one, position of the parts, will 
produce a given articulate sound correctly. How instan¬ 
taneously are these positions assumed and dismissed! 
how numerous are the permutations, how various, yet how 
infallible! Arbitrary and antic variety is not the thing we 
admire; but variety obeying a rule, conducing to an effect, 
and commensurate with exigencies infinitely diversified. I 
believe also that the anatomy of the tongue corresponds 
with these observations upon its activity. The muscles of 
the tongue are so numerous and so implicated with one 
another, that they cannot be traced by the nicest dissec¬ 
tion ; nevertheless (which is a great perfection of the organ,) 
neither the number, nor the complexity, nor what might 
seem to be the entanglement of its fibres, in anywise im¬ 
pede its motion, or render the determination or success of 
its efforts uncertain. 
I here entreat the reader’s permission to step a little out 
of my way, to consider the parts of the mouth , in some of 
their other properties. It has been said, and that by an 
eminent physiologist, that, whenever nature attempts to 
work two or more purposes by one instrument, she does 
both or all imperfectly. Is this true of the tongue, regard¬ 
ed as an instrument of speech, and of taste; or regarded- 
as an instrument of speech, of taste and of deglutition? 
So much otherwise, that many persons, that is to say, nine 
hundred and ninety-nine persons out of a thousand, by the 
instrumentality of this one organ, talk, and taste, and swal¬ 
low, very well. In fact, the constant warmth and moisture 
of the tongue, the thinness of the skin, the papillae upon 
its surface, qualify this organ for its office of tasting, as 
much as its inextricable multiplicity of fibres do for the 
rapid movements which are necessary to speech. Animals 
which feed upon grass, have their tongues covered with a 
perforated skin, so as to admit the dissolved food to the pa¬ 
pillae underneath, which, in the meantime, remain defend¬ 
ed from the rough action of the unbruised spiculse.* 
* Papilla are small bodies situated on the surface and sides of the 
tongue; they are furnished by the extreme filaments of the gustatory 
nerve, through which medium we acquire the sense of tasting. In her¬ 
bivorous animals the papillae are sharp pointed and directed backwards 
to assist in laying hold of the grass. In the cat kind there is a horny or 
prickly set covering the tongue, rendering it rough, and enabling it to 
