THE HUMAN BODY.

Tuapeka Times, Volume XVIII, Issue 1217, 27 January 1886, Page 5

THE HUMAN BODY.

(H. J. Brown, Melbourne.)

" Few men ever reflect upon Lhe marvellous beauty, the admirable adapi tation and the manifold uses of the human body, the temple not made with hands. It is a museum of curiosities, a gallery of art, a mechanical workshops chemical laboratory. The brain is an electric telegraph, and the different nerves are the wires along which the messages are conveyed to and from the organs of sensation. The heart is a double-action force pump, the lungs are a furnace, the stomach an elaborate apparatus for distillation. The liver is an alembic, the eye is a stereoscopic camera obscura, the larynx and vocal cords are a musical instrument of exquisite delicacy, and the ear an seolian harp, containing some three thousand sensitive strings, which vibrate in response to the impressions produced upon them by the undulations of the air. Within our bodies are to be found every description of mechanical agency. The ball and socket, the lever and fulcrum, the valve and hinge, the door and. shutter, the cord and pulley, the cornmill and threshing machine, the tube and cylinder, the sieve and strainer, and scores of other instruments and appliances which it would be wearisome to enumerate. And yet men who know so little of the earthly houses they inhabit, and still less of the laws by which they might maintain them in perfect repair until, having served their purpose, they become worn out, and the change called death renders them unnecessary, presume to arraign the Most High, to sit in judgment upon Him, to condemn what they cannot understand, or to dictate with unhesitating confidence that He does not exist."