diseases resisted; and life prolonged. Were I to take the most effectnal method I know of for undermining the health of an enemy, and making him perfectly wretched, I would cramp his vital organs—in other words, I would lace him.
Another illustration. Deprive the stomach of its required supply of food. You become weaker and fainter in mind, in body, till you die of pure ination. And this will show both the nature and function of digestion, and the importance of a healthy stomach, as well as of furnishing the right kind and quantity of food. Another. Go without breath, or breathe impure air, or air saturated with poisonous gasses, or breathe only half enough, or compress the chest, and the office of the lungs, as well as the importance of abundance of wholesome air for respiration, will become sensibly apparent. Or let the heart become enfeebled—its pulsations labored and inefficient,—the blood unequally distributed, the hands and feet cold, but the head burning up with heat the skin cold and clammy, the body chilly, the blood diseased—any disorder affecting the circulation, and you will have a practical illustration of the importance of a vigorous circulation. Let the liver, let the kidneys, let any of the internal organs be disordered, and then we feel the value of vitality by its scarcity.
Turn the tables. Let the muscles he powerful, so that you can turn off any quantity of work; and for year after year; or walk a great distance without fatigue; or move, labour, and do every thing with perfect ease and even pleasure. Let the lungs be large and active, so that you can drink in full and constant supplies of fresh air to invigorate the whole system, and charge it with that vital electricity derived from breath. Let the heart send the blood, thus thoroughly vitalized, bounding and rushing through all parts of the system, even to the ends of the fingers and toes, imparting health, energy, power, spontaneous action, to every muscle, nerve, the brain included. Let the digestion be perfect, Let food never trouble you. Let it fill up your person, make perfect chyle, perfect blood. Let, in short, all the vital organs be fully developed, be healthy, be vigorous, so that your supply of vitality is abundant, and a flow of healthy, happy feeling thrills throughout your whole frame. Disease keeps aloof. Distress is a total stranger. You know no pain. All you see, all you feel, all you do, but makes you happy,—happy beyond what words can express. Experience alone can disclose the height, the depth, the extent, the sweetness of that happiness which flows from a healthy, vital apparatus.
But to show the rationale of this whole subject still more specifically. The food received into the stomach, when converted into chyle, escapes through an opening called the pyloric orifice, into the duodenum, where it receives two secretions, the one from the gall bladder, and the other from the pancreas or sweet bread—the two converting it into a milky substance which contains all the properties of blood, except the oxygen received from the air. Exposed to air it turns red. As the food passes along the intestines, it is assorted, the refuse part continuing along the intestinal canal till it is rejected in the form of fœces, and the nourishing properties being taken up by the lacteals, which carry the nutrition along up near the back bone till it empties itself into the heart, where, mixing with the blood, it is itself convened into blood; and is sent by the heart, first to the lungs, to be oxygenated or charged with vitality, and then to be received back into the heart and sent round the whole system on its life-imparting mission. If the digestion be bad, the blood is of course imperfect, or perhaps loaded with disease; for when food lies long in the stomach without being digested, it ferments, that is decays or rots, and thus engenders vast quantities of corruption, which, entering the blood, carry disease to all portions of the system, escaping by slow degrees through the lungs, and by insensible perspiration. Hence the importance of having good food, and that perfectly digested;
