struction of the throatle-valve of the trachea. Keep the throttle-valve of the steam-engine upright, and no steam will have passage to the enginethe engine stops-the boiler bursts! So with the throatle-valve. Keep it shut only for a few minutes-respiration ceases-man dies! You admit there is wisdom and power evinced in the one; Oh, will you not admit there is greater wisdom and power evinced in the other? Do you still persist in attributing all this to chance? Then do not any more darken counsel by words without meaning; disguise it as you may, you virtually acknowledge the being of a God. Chance is but another name for the Mighty God.

Again. Was it chance that tore the floor of the mouth immediately above the trachea, a point so suitable and necessary, so that a communication was formed between it and the external vessels that supply the lungs, and taught the whole of its tubes to penetrate the lungs instead of prolonging their elongation to the stomach or bowels? Was it chance that endowed the trachea with such sensitive instability, that, if so much as a particle of food or a drop of water chance to fall into it, the whole frame is instantly convulsed till it is voided? And if so, why have we not the gullet, lying side by side with the trachea, endued with the same instability? Or was it chance that covered the opening of the one tube with a fleshy lid, and left its fellow unprotected and open? And, moreover, is it chance (by virtue of its omnipresence) that, among the myriads of beings that people the globe, stands by each one and raises this lid when breath is required, or shuts it up when food is crossing? Are all these wonderful amazements -this vast work-performed by chance?

But to proceed farther. Shortly after the food has reached the superior side of the stomach, in the manner described, the next step in the process of digestion begins. This step is chemical-is accomplished by a peculiar fluid secreted by vessels ramified in great abundance over the surface of the stomach, and which has the inherent power of acting upon any substance, (the hardest included,) and reducing them to a soft consistency. It is called gastric juice. It is clear, ropy, odourless, and acid. It is the active agent in digestion-it is a real chemical solvent. It has not, however, the same power in all animals. Dr. Stevens of Edinburgh, a man distinguished in medical science, found, by careful experiments, that the gastric juice of the sheep and ox, for instance, while it acted at once upon vegetable matter, ipso facto made no impression upon animal matter, such as beef or mutton. It has also been discovered, in our own day, by Dr. Hunter, that while the gastric juice of man is so strong as to act upon even iron or steel, it makes no impression upon the walls of the stomach during life; it can operate only on dead matter.

Only consider what a variety of different ingredients are at times introduced into this organ. Sometimes flesh of animals, sometimes fish, sometimes vegetables, sometimes all of these. Sometimes, as on public feast-days, flesh of all animals, all kinds of fish, all varieties of vegetables; and these, again, served up with all varieties of spices and desserts. Yet, great as is this variety, this juice seizes upon them all, reduces them to a soft homogeneous consistency, and assimulates their varied contents into one mass.

In a healthy state of parts there is an abundance of this fluid; but its quantity is materially affected by a free, indiscriminate use of intoxicating liquor; for, when intoxicating drinks are taken into the stomach, a flow of gastric juice is called in, and thus that which was necessary for the support

of the system is carried away, the food is left indigested, the body starved, and disease follows, if not death! Surely there is meaning in the Scripture declaration, "Be TEMPERATE in all things."

This fluid is assisted in its digestive work by a great quantity of muscles spread over the stomach, (lying beneath the polished membrane that envelopes it,) by their triturating and churning the food from side to side incessantly. Now, in order to keep the part separated by this process from the part that has to undergo the separation, two stomachs are required. The structure of the body cannot admit of two; nor is this needed, because we have this one organ nicely divided into two by a circular band of fleshy fibres. These divisions are called the upper and lower orifice. The chyme (or good part of the food,) having passed to the lower orifice of the stomach, is compelled to wait there, till a circular muscle, which, like a watchful sentinel, guards the door leading to the intestines, thinks proper to open and allow it to pass into that canal; and so sensitive is it that, unless the aliment has undergone the necessary chemical change, it for a long time refuses an entrance into the bowels.

There is, what we feel inclined to call, another most amazing peculiarity in the stomach. When we first attended the class-room, and for the first time heard of it, we felt inclined to say "Surely God is here!" It was this. When poison has found its way into the region of the stomach, if not at once vomited, the fine velvety-mucus coat which lines it immediately seizes upon it, rolls up into a ball, and keeps it safely between its folds for a considerable length of time before allowing it to enter the system and destroy vitality. But, allowing it to have passed on from the stomach, every vessel through which it journeys, on its way to poison the seat of life, has equally the power, and does give it equal opposition-refuses, till it has been overcome, admittance.

The food having undergone the necessary chemical change, the muscle we have just noticed opens, and the chyme, as well as the refuse part of the food, enters the duodenum, or beginning of the bowels, where another change is produced by an infusion of the secreted contents of two glands.

The first of these glands is called the liver-the largest in the body. Its great office is to secrete that important fluid called bile; it also assists the lungs in removing the carbon from the blood, and thus aids in its purification. The bile is alkaline in its chemical nature. When secreting, it does not pass on to the intestines drop by drop, but is conveyed to the gall-bladder, where it is retained, as in a reservoir, till its agency is required. The position, too, in which the gall-bladder is placed, whereby its time and quantity is regulated, appears to us very wonderful. It lies close upon the external surface of the stomach, and, consequently, is compressed by the expansion of that organ. Now the effect of this compression will be a flow of bile, driven from the reservoir, and sent into the intestines at a time when its usefulness cannot be questioned, and without which, animal life being denuded of properly-prepared nutriment, must inevitably perish.*

-'s lectures I

During the different sessions that I attended the late Professor do not recollect of his once failing, while treating of the liver, to warn his students of the destructive effects of intoxicating liquors upon the liver; yet it carried him away at last. The liver of a drunkard, after a short time, loses its natural colour, becomes mottled and brittle, and will break like a piece of old cheese: it is thence unfit for its natural work; the food is allowed to pass into the system in an unfit state; the body is bereft of suitable

The other gland we speak of is called the pancreas or cats-callop. Its secretion is a kind of saliva devoid of all chemical qualities. It throws its bland moistening stream into the intestines along with the bile.

The bile and pancreatic juice, by acting upon the homogeneous mass sent out from the stomach, causes its parts to separate-pieces fall off-the nutritive is thus separated from the non-nutritive: the good essence is ready for being taken into the system, while the refuse part is ready for being ejected.

We have now the food in the small intestines under a new transformation, called chyle. This chyle is, in reality, the real essence of the food. It is whitish in colour, and altogether resembles milk more than any other liquid we know.

In order, therefore, to convey the chyle, so separated, from the small intestines, and to introduce it into the general circulation, we have a great number of capillary (hair-like) tubes, beautifully ramified over its entire elongation, piercing it in all directions, and carrying up the chyle to little glandular bodies scattered over the mysentry. These hair-tubes are called the lacteals. They have their mouths inserted into the intestinal canal, have the power of sucking up only the nutritive part of the food, and (like all the other vessels of the body) is endued with the instinctive power of refusing either unfit or poisonous matter.

But the chyle is not left in these little glands thus spread over the mysentry. Emerging from these small glands, at each of which it undergoes a new purification, are to be seen larger tubes leading to larger glands, on this same web of fatty matter, that binds together the convolutions of the bowels; and so on, till all these pipes meet, and pour in, together, their united contents into one common tank, which tank again creeps alongside the backbone, and "ascends, by muscular action, contrary to the laws of gravity, until beneath the left shoulder it oozes into the left-subclavian vein, mingles with the blood," and is carried on to the right auricle of the heart. From the right auricle, by the contracting power of the heart in circulation, it is sent to the right ventricle, immediately below, and which is united by a small opening secured by a valve, to prevent regurgitation; by the contraction of the right ventricle it is sent along the pulmonary arteries to the lungs, where it is purified, and where digestion may be said to end. The blood oxygenised is again sent back by the pulmonary veins to the left auricle of the heart; thence to its left ventricle; from whence, by its powerful and spiral contraction, the blood is driven on to the farthest extremities, depositing bone where bone is required, muscle where muscle is required, skin where skin is required, &c., &c.

In conclusion, no language of others can be stronger than that of Galen. "How can a man of any intelligence refer all this to chance as its cause? or, if he deny this to be the effect of foresight and skill, I would ask, What is there that foresight and skill do accomplish? For, surely, when chance or fortune act, we see not this correspondence and regularity of parts. I am

nourishment-digestion is clogged-disease siezes upon the weak tenement-death shakes the spirit from its clayey lodgement, and chases it up to the judgment-seat of God. Oh, what a warning does the emaciated form and haggard looks of the drunkard give to us young men! They speak, with many tongues, of ruined fortunes-of blasted hopes-oh, they speak, and worst of all, of destroyed souls! Flee, therefore, youthful lusts!

"For, mong the flow'rs that wreathe the sparkling bowl,

Fell adders hiss and poisonous serpents roll.”

not very solicitious about terms; but, if you choose to call that chance which has so nicely constructed and distributed all the parts of an animal body, do so, only remember and allow that, in so doing, you do not fairly exercise the privilege of framing new terms: for in this day you may call the meridian splendour of the sun by the name of night, and the sun itself darkness!"*

Let the doubting believer, tempted to deny the existence of his Maker, reach hither his hand, and be no longer doubtful but believing. Reach hither your hand-lay it on your beating heart; then-then raise your eyes to heaven, and, with your hand resting on this living token of this existence, and your eyes fixed on the place where this glory dwelleth, try if you dare say, "There is no God on high!" F.

MISS BREMER AND HER WORKS.

While we

Of northern parts too little has been said and written. have been carried again and again up the Rhine, till we know almost every ruin that throws its shadow across that river of legend and of song; while (thanks to the battle of Waterloo) at Brussels we are at home, and have Rome by heart; while even disinterred Pompeii has our sympathies and researches; how little do we know of the land of Linnæus and Charles XII. Till lately, it has been to us a cold and rude country, once the home of a barbarian race and a strange mystic mythology; but things are improving, and, although we cannot with Molière's physician affirm that nous arous changé tout cela, we are happy to know that we are changing our false ideas as positive knowledge supersedes supposition and, perhaps, prejudice. Here literature, their literature, comes to our aid; for if by a man's company his character may be judged, how much more by his books?

The celebrated Swedish authoress Frederika Bremer was the daughter of a Stockholm merchant. In her, then, we behold another recruit to the ranks of literature, from that class which supplies every department of society with its most vigorous and energetic people.

With a patriotic pride, we feel that it is to her honour that she has been found worthy of being rendered accessible to those whose language is that which Shakspeare wrote and Milton sang.

It is satisfactory to learn that Miss Bremer has expressed herself pleased with the results of Mrs. Howitt's labours. To create is certainly less difficult than to translate well: with the aid of dictionaries, lame renderings can be easily made, but to give the spirit of a foreign author, without being guilty of violating the idiom or grammar of our own tongue, is a labour requiring greater intellectual powers than those who never tried the experiment would be ready to conceive.

Commerce and literature! In these two gifts of God are the seeds of peace and prosperity. Will it be easy to go to war with those who supply our necessities, or whose spirits have found an echoing voice in our own breasts? No; were we "wide as the poles asunder," a common literature would be found a bond of sufficient strength to kindle and diffuse a spirit of brotherhood.

It is really a fashion of the day to read Miss Bremer's works; though it is a curious fact that, when the first translation was offered some years ago, no London bookseller had sufficient faith in the good taste of the English people to hazard the publication.

These books were indeed novelties to us. Differing equally from the mysterious, the fashionable, and the sentimental schools, they introduce, in place of a regular plot, a picture of the real course of life; there is no grand crash of all the disagreeable people, and exaltation of all the good ones at the end of the book; we feel that the narration is entitled to be considered as a bona fide representation of real experiences. It begins at a certain point necessarily, but there is no forced opening; the characters do not excite the suspicion that they are made merely to play their parts in the novel, and then be put away for ever-if we leave them living, we leave them with the thought that it is probable they will have more vicissitudes yet.

She shows a great diversity of characters without violent contrasts; her people are people, and not angels or demons; the good have their weaknesses, and the bad their redeeming virtues, as in real life.

She allows us to inhale the bracing air of her native north; she shows that life ought to be to us all a combat with bad principles, and a following out of good ones. The evil of being driven resistlessly down the stream of life is graphically shown in Nina.

We are made to see the "strife" as well as the "peace" of life, and yet not unnaturally unmingled; we can say so have we sorrowed and so enjoyed."

But she is sometimes wild and improbable-Elizabeth in the H. Family is not a human creature, but an embodiment of uncontrolled passion; she affects us as if a statue of Pain had become suddenly animate, and lived and breathed among us. Some of her women are truly lovely and loveable, as Adelaide in the President's Daughters, and Selina in the Diary.

Miss Bremer is rich in colouring. This is a pleasing and powerful resource of an author, to paint in words; but there is a danger of resorting to it too often. This, perhaps, she has not always escaped; the reiteration of green, white, red, &c., tires us. Perhaps this is owing to our mutability; for is not everything coloured in nature, and do we ever complain of it?

She presents us with men neither rich nor handsome, with women neither young nor beautiful, whom we cannot help loving, as Baron H. and Edla. Who does not admire his chivalrous behaviour, persevering good nature, and devotion to the fair Clara, though, good as he is, his offering (like that of many other devotees at similar shrines,) is unaccepted? Who does not reverence her sacrifice of self, her struggle for victory over an ungenial nature, and, finally, the sublimity of her death-bed peace.

But it is as a picture of Swedish life and society that these books are chiefly to be valued, and should be received with joy as a link in the chain of acquaintance with the people and manners of another land. Stockholm, with the bay, its rocks, and the white-winged birds that hover over them, the royal palace, the zoological gardens, the bridge, the quay, seems familiar to us from the animated sketches of these interesting books. The families of Sweden, with their soft-handed and blue-eyed children, are parts of our world, and no longer mere units in the "table of population" furnished by geographers.

Debarred by their climate from any great extent of out-door amusement,