times with double tendons, sometimes with treble tendons, sometimes with none; sometimes one tendon to several muscles, at other times one muscle to several tendons. The shape of the organ is susceptible of an incalculable variety, whilst the original property of the muscle, the law and line of its contraction, remains the same; and is simple. Herein the muscular system may be said to bear a perfect resemblance to our works of art. An artist does not alter the native quality of his materials, or their laws of action. He takes these as he finds them. His skill and ingenuity are employed in turning them, such as they are, to his account, by giving to the -parts of his machine a form and relation, in which these unalterable properties may operate to the production of the effects intended. 6. The ejaculations can never too often be repeated. How many things must go right for us to be an hour at ease! How many more to be vigorous and active! Yet vigour and activity are, in a vast plurality of instances, preserved in human bodies, notwithstanding that they depend upon so great a number of instruments of motion, and notwithstanding that the defect or disorder sometimes of a very small instrument, of a single pair, for instance, out of the four hundred and fortysix muscles which are employed, may be attended with grievous inconveniency. There is piety and good sense in the following observation taken out of the Religious Philosopher: "With much compassion," says this writer, 66 well as astonishment at the goodness of our loving Creator, have I considered the sad state of a certain gentleman, who, as to the rest, was in pretty good health, but only as wanted the use of these two little muscles that serve to lift up the eyelids, and so had almost lost the use of his sight, being forced, as long as this defect lasted, to shove up his eye-lids every moment with his own hands!" In general, we may re mark how little those who enjoy the perfect use of their organs, know the comprehensiveness of the blessing, the variety of their obligation. They perceive a result, but they think little of the multitude of concurrences and rectitudes which go to form it. Beside these observations, which belong to the muscular organ as such, we may notice some advantages of structure which are more conspicuous in muscles of a certain class or description than in others. Thus, I. The variety, quickness, and precision of which muscular motion is capable, are seen, I think, in no part so remarkably as in the tongue. It is worth any man's while to watch the agility of his tongue; the wonderful promptitude with which it executes changes of position, and the perfect exactness. Each syllable of articulated sound requires for its utterance a specific action of the tongue, and of parts adjacent to it. The disposition and configuration of the mouth, appertaining to every letter and word, is not only peculiar, but, if nicely and accurately attended to, perceptible to the sight; insomuch that curious persons have availed themselves of this circumstance to teach the dumb to speak, and to understand what is said by others. In the same person, and after his habit of speaking is formed, one, and only one position of the parts will produce a given articulate sound correctly. How instantaneously are these posi tions 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 dissection; 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 any wise impede its motion, or render the determination or success of its efforts uncertain.* In fact, the constant warmth and moisture of the tongue, the thinness of the skin, the papillæ 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 papillæ underneath, which, in the mean time, remain defended from the rough action of the unbruised spicule. There are brought together within the cavity of the mouth more dis tinct uses, and parts executing more distinct offices, than I think can be found lying so near to one another, or within the same compass, in any other portion of the body, viz. teeth of different shape; first for cutting, secondly for grinding: muscles, most artificially disposed for carrying on the compound motion of the lower jaw, half lateral, and half vertical, by which the mill is worked: fountains of saliva, springing up in different parts of the cavity, for the moistening of the food, whilst the mastication is going on: glands to feed the fountains: a muscular constriction of a very peculiar kind in the back part of the cavity, for the guiding of the prepared aliment into its passage towards the stomach, and in many cases for carrying it along that passage: for, although we may imagine this to be done simply by the weight of the food itself, it in truth is not so, even in the upright posture of the human neck; and most evidently is not the case with quadrupeds; with a horse, for instance, in which, when pasturing, the food is thrust upward by muscular strength, instead of descending of its own accord. In the mean time, and within the same cavity, is going on another business, altogether different from what is here described, that of respira tion and speech. In addition, therefore, to all that has been mentioned, * 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, regarded 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 swallow, very well. 3 L 2 We we have a passage opened from this cavity to the lungs, for the admission of air, exclusively of every other substance: we have muscles, some in the larynx, and without number in the tongue, for the purpose of modulating that air in its passage, with a variety, a compass, and precision, of which no other musical instrument is capable. And, lastly, which, in my opinion, crowns the whole as a piece of machinery, we have a specific contrivance for dividing the penumatic part from the sarily shut close upon the body, from which the nutriment is drawn. This is a circumstance which always appeared to me worthy of notice. The nose would have been necessary, although it had not been the organ of smelling. The making it the seat of a sense, was superadding a new use to a part already wanted; was taking a wise advantage of an antecedent and a constitutional necessity. mals. From the same. mechanical, and for preventing one of the Succession of Plants and Aniset of actions interfering with the other. Where various functions are united, the difficulty is to guard against the inconveniencies of a too great complexity. In no apparatus put together by art, and for the purposes of art, do I know such multifarious uses so aptly combined as in the natural organization of the human mouth; or where the structure compared with the uses, is so simple. The mouth, with all these intentions to serve, is a single cavity; is one machine; with its parts neither crowded nor confused, and each unembarrassed by the rest; each at least at liberty, in a degree, sufficient for the end to be attained. If we cannot eat and sing at the same moment, we can eat one moment, and sing the next; the respiration proceeding freely all the while. There is one case, however, of this double office, and that of the (earliest) necessity, which the mouth. alone could not perform; and that is, carrying on together the two actions of sucking and breathing. Another route, therefore, is opened for the air, namely, through the nose, which lets the breath pass backward and forward, whilst the lips, in the act of sucking, are neces The generation of the animal no more accounts for the contrivance of the eye or the car, than, upon a supposition stated in a preceding chapter, the production of a watch by the motion and mechanism of a former watch, would account for the skill and intention evidenced in the watch so produced; than it would account for the disposition of the wheels, the catching of their teeth, the relation of the several parts of the works to one another, and to their common end, for the suitableness of their forms and places to their offices for their con. nection, their operation, and the useful result of that operation. I do insist most strenuously upon the correctness of this comparison; that it holds as to every other mode of specific propagation; and that whatever was true of the watch, under the hypothesis above mentioned, is true of plants and animals. 1. To begin with the fructification of plants. Can it be doubted but that the seed contains a particular organization? Whether a latent plantule with the means of temporary nutrition, or whatever else it be, be, it incloses an organization suited to the germination of a new plant. Has the plant which produced the seed any thing more to do with that organization than the watch would have to do with the structure of the watch which was produced in the course of its mechanical movement? I mean, has it any thing at all to do with the contrivance? The maker and contriver of one watch, when he inserted within it a mechanism suited to the production of another watch, was, in truth, the maker and contriver of that other watch. All the properties of the new watch were to be referred to his agency; the design manifested in it, to his intention; the art to him as the artist, the colocation of each part to his placing; the action, effect, and use, to his counsel, intelligence, and workmanship. In producing it by the intervention of a former watch, he was only working by one set of tools instead of another. So it is with the plant, and the seed produced by it. Can any distinction be assigned between the two cases; between the producing watch, and the producing plant? both passive, unconscious substances; both, by the organization which was given to them, producing their like, without understanding or design, both, that is, instruments. 2. From plants, we may proceed to oviparous animals; from seeds to eggs. Now I say that the bird has the same concern in the formation of the egg which she lays, as the plant has in that of the seed which it drops, and no other, nor greater. The internal constitution of the egg is as much a secret to the hen, as if the hen were inanimate. Her will sannot alter it, or change a single feather of the chick. She can nei ther foresee nor determine of which sex her brood shall be, or how many of either; yet the thing produced shall be, from the first, very different in its make, according to the sex which it bears. So far, therefore, from adapting the means, she is not before-hand apprized of the effect. If there be concealed within that smooth shell a provision and a preparation for the production and nourishment of a new animal, they are not of her providing or preparing: if there be contrivance, it is none of hers. Although, therefore, there be the difference of life and perceptivity between the animal and the plant, it is a difference which enters not into the account. It is a foreign circumstance. It is a difference of properties not employed. The animal function and the vegetable function are alike destitute of any which can operate upon the form of the thing produced. The plant has no design in producing the seed, no comprehension of the nature or use of what it produces: the bird, with respect to its egg, is not above the plant with re*spect to its seed. Neither the one nor the other bears that sort of relation to what proceeds from them which a joiner does to the chair which he makes. Now a cause, which bears this relation to the effect, is what we want, in order to account for the suitableness of means to an end, the fitness and fit- ting of one thing to another; and this cause the parent plant or animal does not supply. It is further observable concerning the propagation of plants and animals, that the apparatus employed exhibits no resemblance to the thing produced; in this respect 3 L3 holding holding an analogy with instruments and tools of art. The filaments, antheræ, and stigmata of flowers bear no more resemblance to the young plant, or even to the seed, which is formed by their interven. tion, than a chisel or plane does to a table or chair. What then are the filaments, antheræ, and stigmata of plants, but instruments, strictly so called? 3. We may advance from animals which bring forth eggs, to animals which bring forth their young alive; and, of this latter class, from the lowest to the highest, from irrational to rational life, from brutes to the human species; without perceiving, as we proceed, any alteration whatever in the terms of the comparison. The rational animal does not produce its offspring with more certainty or success than the irrational animal: a man than a quadruped, a quadruped than a bird; nor (for we may follow the gradation through its whole scale) a bird than a plant; nor a plant than a watch, a piece of dead mechanism, would do, upon the supposition which has already so often been repeated. Rationality, therefore, has nothing to do in the business. If an account must be given of the contrivance which we observe; if it be demanded, whence arose either the contrivance by which the young animal is produced, or the contrivance manifested in the young animal itself, it is not from the reason of the parent that any such account can be drawn. He is the cause of his offspring in the same sense as that in which a gardener is the cause of the tulip which grows upon his parterre and in no other. We admire the flower; we examiue the plant; we perceive the conduciveness of many of its parts to their end and office: we observe a provision for its nourishment, growth, protection, and fecundity: but we never think of the gardener in all this. We attribute nothing of this to his agency; yet it may still be true, that without the gardener, we should not have had the tulip. Just so it is with the succession of animals even of the highest order. For the contrivance discovered in the structure of the thing produced, we want a contriver. The parent is not that contriver. His consciousness decides that question. He is in total ignorance why that which is produced took its present form rather than any other. It is for him only to be astonished by the effect. We can no more look, therefore, to the intelligence of the parent animal for what we are in search of, a cause of relation and of subserviency of parts to their use, which relation and subserviency we see in the procreated body, than we can refer the internal conformation of an acorn to the intelligence of the oak from which it dropped, or the structure of the watch to the intelligence of the watch which produced it; there being no difference, as far as argument is concerned, between an intelligence which is not exerted, and an intelligence which does not exist. Two Letters on the subject of Public Education, from the celebrated Cowper. To the Rev. William Unwin. My dear friend, Sept. 7, 1780. As many gentlemen as there are in the world, who have children, and heads capable of reflecting on the important subject of their edu. cation, so many opinions there are about |