Note 125 — LETTERS ON ART.

See “The Oxford Museum,” pp. 17-23. The following is a portion of the passage alluded to: “Without the Geologist on one side, and the Anatomist and Physiologist on the other, Zoology is not worthy of its name. The student of life, bearing in mind the more general laws which in the several departments above named he will have sought to appreciate, will find in the collections of Zoology, combined with the Geological specimens and the dissections of the Anatomist, a boundless field of interest and of inquiry, to which almost every other science lends its aid: from each science he borrows a special light to guide him through the ranges of extinct and existing animal forms, from the lowest up to the highest types, which, last and most perfect, but preshadowed in previous ages, is seen in Man. By the aid of physiological illustrations he begins to understand how hard to unravel are the complex mechanisms and prescient intentions of the Maker of all; and he slowly learns to appreciate what exquisite care is needed for discovering the real action of even an apparently comprehended machine. And so at last, almost bewildered, but not cast down, he attempts to scrutinize in the rooms devoted to Medicine, the various injuries which man is doomed to undergo in his progress towards death; he begins to revere the beneficent contrivances which shine forth in the midst of suffering and disease, and to veil his face before the mysterious alterations of structure, to which there seem attached pain, with scarce relief, and a steady advance, without a check, to death. He will look, and as he looks, will cherish hope, not unmixed with prayer, that the great Art of Healing may by all these things advance, and that by the progress of profounder science, by the spread among the people of the resultant practical knowledge, by stricter obedience to physiological laws, by a consequent more self-denying spirit, some disorders may at a future day be cured, which cannot be prevented, and some, perhaps, prevented, which never can be cured.”