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