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rch! It may stick to your ribs after that, to be sure; but will it not stick harder to your conscience? With what pleasure do you help yourself to your haunch, when the conviction is staring you in the face, that what seems venison is but adipose matter and azote? That you are only making a great Nassau balloon of yourself when you are dreaming of hard condition, and preparing yourself for the fossil state when blowing the froth off your porter. Of latter years the great object of science would appear to be an earnest desire to disenchant us from all the agreeable and pleasant dreams we have formed of life, and to make man insignificant without making him humble. Thus, one class of philosophers labour hard to prove that manhood is but monkeyhood--that a slight adaptation of the tail to the customs of civilized life has enabled us to be seated; while the invention of looking-glasses, bear's grease, cold cream, and macassar, have cultivated our looks into the present fashion. Another, having felt over our skulls, gravely asserts, "There is a _vis a tergo_ of wickedness implanted in us, that must find vent in murder and bloodshed." While the magnetic folk would make us believe that we are merely a kind of ambulating electric-machine, to be charged at will by the first M. Lafontaine we meet with, and mayhap explode from over-pressure. While such liberties are taken with us without, the case is worse within. Our circulation is a hydraulic problem; our stomach is a mill--a brewing vat--a tanner's yard--a crucible, or a retort. You yourself, in all the resplendent glory of your braided frock, and your decoration of the Guelph, are nothing but an aggregate of mechanical and chemical inventions, as often going wrong as right; and your wife, in the pride of her Parisian bonnet, and robe _a la Victorine_, is only gelatine and adipose substance, phosphate of lime, and a little arsenic. Now, let me ask, what remains to us of life, if we are to be robbed of every fascination and charm of existence in this fashion? And again--has medical science so exhausted all the details of practical benefit to mankind, that it is justified in these far-west explorations into the realms of soaring fancy, or the gloomy depths of chemical analysis? Hydrophobia, consumption, and tetanus are not so curable that we can afford to waste our sympathies on chimpanzees: nor is this world so pleasant that we must deny ourselves the advantage of all
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