Scientific.

Otago Witness, Issue 1427, 29 March 1879, Page 8

Scientific.

. « . MARVELS OF MAN. While the gastric juice has a mild, bland sweetish taste, it possesses the power of dissolving the hardest food that can be swallowed ; it has no influence whatever on the soft and delicate fibres of the living stomach, nor upon the living hand, but, at the moment of death, it begins to eat them away with the power of tho strongest acids. There is dust on the sea, on land, in the valley, and on the mountain top ; there is dust always and everywhere ; the atmosphere is full of it ; it penetrates the noisome dungeon, and visits the deepest, darkest caves of the earth;-* no palace door can shut it out, no drawer so \/ secret as to escape its presence ; every breath of wind dashe3 it upon the open eye, and yet that eye is not blinded, because there is a fountain of the blandest fluid in N<\turo incessantly emptying itself under the eyelid, which spreads it over the surface of the ball at every winking, and washes every atom of dust away. But this liquid, so mild, and so well adapted to the eye itself, has somo acridity, which under certain circumstances, becomes so decidod as to be scalding to the skin, and would rot away the eyelids were it not that along the edges of them there arc little oil mauufactories, which spread over their surface a coating, as impervious to the liquids necessary for keeping the eyeball washed clean as the best varnish is impervious to water. The breath which leaves the lungs has been so perfectly divested of its life-giving properties that to rebreathe it, unmixed with other air, the moment it escapes from the mouth, would cause death by suffocation ; while if it hovered about us, a more or less baleful influence over health and life would be occasioned ; but it is made of a nature so much lighter than the common air that theiustantitescapesthelipsandnostrilsitascends to the higher regions, above the breathing point there to be rectified, renovated, and_ sent back again, replete with purity and life. How rapidly it ascends is beautifully exhibited every frosty morning. But foul and deadly as the expired air 10, Nature, wisely economical in all her works and ways ? turns it to good account in its out-

ward piw.i^e thrausj'a tuj or^iai >f vo oo aad. makes of ib the whisper of lore, the soft words of affection, the tender toue3 of huauu sympathy, tho swoabdsL strains of r.ividhiag urasic, tho persuasive el jqueace of the fi -uhed orat>r. If a well mide mm ba e-cttrnd^dou fcha ground, his arms at light ausle* with th-3 bjdy, a cke-le, making tho u.ivol iU centre, jasfc ttke3 m tae Siead, tho finder ends and feet. The distiuea from top tj too is precisely the same as tkit between the tips of the riugeivs ivheu the arms are extended.