Man, in his physical structure and adaptations

Front matter

i:Ti:;ib|U!;JBIiffiJ>|i8HJai}|!iI!!«{(i|««p{tpgl*^

^1 m

SUWT

Preface

There is a beautiful allegory in the Book of Job, which, like every allegoi-y in the Sacred Volume, is applicable to all conditions of men, and all pursuits in which they can engage. Job is afflicted ; and, being in ignorance of the cause, he laments, and labours to discover it. His three wise and learned friends come to comfort him by pointing out the justice of his affliction, and they lecture him on the stubbornness of his ignorance ; but Job rejects their schooling w^ith all the boldness of a man conscious of his own integrity, and appeals from them to the judgment of his Maker. Then Elihu, the son of Barachel the Buzite, a young man who lays no claim to wisdom, comes forward to plead with Job, " in God's stead," as Job himself had wished— that is, in the simple voice of nature. He argues from the government of creation, and of Man as a portion of this creation ; and shows that the real condition of Man can be known only from the study of the power, the

IV PREFACE.

wisdom, and the goodness of God, as displayed in the phenomena of nature ; that every hypothesis resting upon a foundation different from this is vain and void ; and he closes his oration with these remarkable words : — " Men do therefore fear him : he respecteth not any that are wise in heart ;" — that is, any who pretend to have wisdom, or knowledge, of themselves, in addition to that which they derive from observation and experience. Then comes the climax of the allegory : — The Lord answers Job " out of the whirlwind" — Sia XaiXattos koL vi<pQ)v — out of the turmoil of the clouds. Wisdom from on high breaks through the doubt and difficulty of the troubled mind; and the voice of this wisdom is still the voice of nature, though, being in the first person, and rising in expression with the speaker, it is far more striking than the preliminary or preparatory discourse of the son of Barachel.

Men in all ages have their afflictions as well as the Patriarch, or if they have them not, they make them ; and, like the Patriarch, they long for wisdom, whereby they may find the means of relief.

On no subject is this longing more hard to be gi*atified than on the subject of ourselves — our real place and purpose in the world, and the final destiny of our being. If, when the whole of wild nature around us is in a state of

PREFACE. V

perpetual enjoyment, and we are in constant toil and activity, our final destiny be to feed the larvae of blind beetles, the little finger of our affliction is tenfold thicker than the loins of that which fell upon Job : his burden was a mote — ours is a millstone.

Then, the men who liave taken upon themselves the office of assisting us in this matter — though, like Job's three friends, they have been men of much wisdom — yet, in general, they have come under the denomination of "the wise in heart," — that is, they have formed their assertions on their own theories or hypotheses, and not on that which exists, and can be observed or fairly inferred from actual observation. Hence, they reprove, but they do not reform ; they lecture, but they do not instruct.

Accordingly, the subject which it should interest us the most to know, is the one of which we are most ignorant and to the study of which we have the greatest and most general aversion. There is a fear to approach it, something analogous to the fear which children have to go into the dark — not because they know that there is any specific cause of alarm, but from di-ead that there may be such a cause. They who bring us into this state, or who leave us in it, however vain they may be, are but Job's comforters

to us. They only add the burden of their own tediousnes'

A 2

VI PREFACE.

to that which was grievous before ; and we shrink from them as Job did from his friends, and we fall back upon our own thoughts with more bitterness of spii-it than ever.

I have seen this in the cases of many, and I have felt it in my own ; and therefore, after much reflection on the subject, I am anxious, though of course in a very humble way, to perform the part of Elihu. I profess not to teach : I can only point out to others the way in which I flatter myself that I have obtained instruction — ay, and some portion of that moral confidence which poises a man erect in his position, let the wind of the world blow as it lists. We must not trust to human theories, let them be backed by what authority of name they may. We must read the Book — that volume which is never closed, and the characters whereof are traced by the creative finger. We must study Man as he actually is, in his structure and in his conduct, from the hour of his birth to the final expiration of his breath ; and this we must do— from a Icnowledge of the other creatures, and a full and fair comparison with them— whether he is as perfectly, fully, and exclusively of and for the present world as they are, or whether there is not in him an adaptation for which the present world has no counterpart— a desire which it cannot gratify ; and upon

PREFACE. Vll

the result of this, and upon no other sure foundation, we must build our hopes. If we do not this, our words and our worshippings are empty words and useless observances ; and we are like a thistle-down in the pathless desert, at the mercy of every wind. If we do not, by some such process as this, establish the Man ui one firm and demonstrative belief, then are we at the mercy of the animal — the mere slaves of animal passion ; and, if such is the case, it matters not much whether the outgoing of the passion be in cupidity or in cant, if these really are difTerent ; for if the one invades the possession, the other is as prone to mangle the reputation.

On such a subject, it is necessary to write with a caution bordering upon tameness, more especially at the beginning ; for, upon the same principle as the more feeble of the canine breed are always the foremost to give tongue, they who understand the least of the nature and destiny of Man are ever the most forward, if any one shall venture to assail those dogmas the foundation of which they have never examined. There is another reason : as in mechanics, so in mental inquiries, a wedge is always the more powerful and the more easily driven, the nearer that it approaches to a simple plane.

For these, and for other reasons, some of which must

Vm PREFACE,

occur to every intelligent reader, 1 have made this volume as unassuming, and as free from theoretic formality, as I possibly could ; and I flatter myself that it will be intelligible to the most humble capacity, but at the same time not unworthy of the better-informed.

The argument for which I have endeavoured to prepare the way is, that the human body is organised and adapted for purposes which cannot have their complete fulfilment in the present life. This will lead to the consideration of Intellectual Man in a second volume ; and, as the doctrine of Intellect, and its necessai-y consequence, Immortality, are the foundation of morality in the individual, and of good order in society, two more volumes will be required to complete the ^hole subject, though each of the four will, by the avoiding of the formality of system, be an entire book without the others. They are my favourites above all others that I have written ; and whatever may be said of the execution, the subject deserves attention from the public.

ROBERT MUDIE.

ANALYSIS OF THE CONTENTS.

Chapter I

r.

PRELIMINARY REMARKS.

Self-knowledge peculiar to Man — Objections to books of mere anatomy, as affording the knowledge required— Objections to the writings of Paley— Difficulties in the study of Man— The secret character— Why all men are not great— Why some are great— The use of ourselves the grand point to be known— The human body and machines— What respecting Man is most important to be known — Division of the subject .... Page 1

CHAPTER 11.

IMPORTANCE OF" SELF-KNOVVLEDGS.

That " knowledge is power," is not universally true— Power is not material, or a property of matter— Popular notion of power — Simple knowledge is not power— Obstacles to knowledge— Value of negative knowledge— To whom knowledge is and is not power —Education of the body— Education by experience— Examples— The theorist and the boat— Case of a peer— Regularity of thought and action— Ant— The hand— Mind— Its neglect— Degradation- Means of greatness ....... 33

Chapter III. Man Alone Can Acquire Knowledge

Definition of knowledge —Knowledge of language — Pleasures of memory— Memory is ?nutrf— Systematic zoologists-r-Cuvier's mistake—Sensation is not knowledge— Man and animals— Vital functions— Our ignorance of the system— Organs and functions- Dreams of phrenologists— The human body cannot acquire knowledge—Animal faculties— Vegetables and their adaptations- Forms of matter — Animal sagacity .... 69

X CONTENTS.

Chapter IV. Man Can Have No Knowledge But What He Acquires

Man's original endowment — Innate ideas absurd — Instinctive perfection of young animals — Original genius a fancy — Body and mind — Derangement of tlie body— Original differences of infants are wholly physical — Knowledge htis physical sources — Abomination of cant — We can address the body only — Effective means of addressing it— Beginning of knowledge— Identity is the foundation of knowledge and of action — Will — Delay — Physical training Page 106

CHAPTER v. PLACE AND PURPOSE OF MAN

Talue of a hint — Of self-teaching — The organisation of Man — Advantages of studi/inij the animals — Illustrations — Adaptation of animals to their places — Our proper school — The house-fly and the householder — Adaptation of fishes— Of birds— Organs and organisation — Breathing — The first breath — Motion — Repose — Importance of fossil bones — Wings, and their characters — Feet of mammalia — Clavicles — Limbs for motion — Complex limbs — Carnivora, and their uses — Legs of bears — Structure of a paw — Handed animals — Prehensile tails — Perfect adaptation of animals to localities — Man an exception ..... 146

CHAPTER VL

SENSATION AND THE SENSES.

The first man — Must have educated himself — Notion of mind — Popular errors about feeling— No feeling in vital parts— Case recorded by Harvey — Proper sensibility of the heart — Sensations of nerves — Sensibility of the eyes — Vision in animals — Sensations of the ear — Man alone has sensations of perception — Instincts of safety perfect in animals, very limited in Man — Membranes only are sentient — Nature of the muscular sense — Feeling of the centre of gravity — Muscular sense our first tutor — Man as a mere animal — Utter fatuity — Wretchedness of Man as an animal 198

CONTENTS. • XI

CUAPTER VII.

SENSATION — PARTICtTLATlS OF SOME OF THE SENSES, AND THEin CO.VNF.XION.

Doctrine of developiricnts -flaking of a planetary system — Development of matter into Man — Action not material or organic — Geneial adiiptation of Man — Structure and functions of the eye — I're^sure on tlie eye — Vision not mech nical — IJetina — Field of view— Axis of vision— Oblique and complex lights— JSange of the eye— The inferior senses — Sensation of tlie ear — Obscurity of the process of sensation — Symjiatliy of tlie ear and voice — Popular orators — Language is intellectual— Conclusion . Page 247

EXPLANATION OF THE VIGNETTES.

■ As an illustration of the Physical powers of Man, two subjects have been chosen which seemed much to the purpose — the Frontispiece represents the story of Milo of Crotona, a celebrated Athleta, who, it is snid, attempted to rend asunder an oali which had been shattered by lightning; he succeeded in his attempt, but his strength failing, the tiee, in the rebound, closed upon his hand : being alone, in a wild forest, he remained a prisoner, and was destroyed by wolves. The Vignette represents the celebrated statue immortalised by^-»| Byron as the Dying Gladiator, a worli showing at once the delicate hand of the Artist, and muscular power of the Man.

MAN,

IN HIS PHYSICAL STRUCTURE AND ADAPTATIONS.

Chapter I. Preliminary Remarks

"Know thyself," is the solemn admonition of the great Athenian Lawgiver, in consequence of which he is placed foremost in the list of the Seven Sages of Ancient Greece ; and the admonition has been repeated by high authorities, both in ordinary philosophy and in the Sacred Volume : and it is not a little remarkable that Linnaeus, whose short hints often embody more matter than the lengthened disquisitions of more wordy philosophers, has made the power of obeying this mandate the only characteristic of man, in his "System of Nature," or grand classification of the li\dng and growing inhabitants of the earth. After the mere mention of the name, all that the great Swedish naturalist adds, to distinguish man from the other animated beings, are the two short and simple words, " knowing himself," — that is, that man can obey the injunction of Solon, if he will ; and though Linnagus had exhausted the whole of that eloquence which, when

PHYSICAL "WORKS the occasion required it, he could exert so warmly and so well, he would have added nothing to the force and the fullness of that very brief expression.

Considering the high authorities by whom the command has been given, and the power of complying with it expressed so strongly as being the distinguishing character of Man as a physical being, it is somewhat remarkable that we have had no book for popular reading, in which even the outlines of the whole subject are treated in such a manner as to be efficient for practical purposes.

We have no lack of books, and veiy many of them excellent books, upon the anatomy and physiology of the human body in the aggregate, and upon the structures and functions of all its several parts, systems, and organs. But these books are, for the most part, of a medical or surgical nature, relating to the structure of the body, or that action of its parts which has little to do with giving man more efficient use of it in its healthy states — as they describe it wholly or chiefly in its mechanical arrangement, and its chemical composition, with very little reference to the place which it holds, and the part which it is required to act, in the system of created nature. Besides, there are some obstacles and objections to these books as part of the every-day reading of the great body of the people. In the first place, they are too expensive ; in the second place, they are unpleasant books to look at ; in the third place, many parts of them, however necessary and valuable they may be for medical men, are unfit for general circulation and perusal ; and, in

ON MAN. 3

the fourth place, not any, or even all of them collectively, communicate, or are intended to communicate, that popular knowledge of the body which is implied in the injunction which has been quoted.

The dissection of a human body is an operation repulsive to our natural feelings, for what purpose soever it may be performed ; and, though one can easily understand that a man who is intent upon finding out the best means of reducing fractures, amputating limbs, and saving lives, may dissect a human body with as much scientific zeal and honesty of intention as a chemist analyses a substance, or a mathematician solves a problem ; yet we greatly doubt whether an idle spectator, who had no scientific purpose in view, — no prospect of bettering mankind by the result of all that cutting and mangling of which he was a voluntary witness, could escape ^^dth equal purity of feeling. That professional men, who attend to such matters, and who must attend to them, or otherwise be but a lame hand in the operative proceedings, and who do so from the desire of doing good, or more frequently perhaps from that of attaining to eminence in their profession — which is scarcely less praiseworthy than the other, are not aff"ected by those repulsive sights, is proved by the fact that medical men, taken as a class, are among the most suave in their manners and kindly in their dispositions, as well as among the most intelligent, in the whole community.

But still, that does not make mangled bodies, and severed limbs, and heads sawTi asunder, and the processes of the most painful operations, and the aspects paley's natural theology.

of the most loathsome diseases, eithei in the human subject itself or in pictorial representations, more fit for the public eye, or for being the gi'aphic attractions of books from which the younger branches of families are to glean their information. The chief objection to Paley's Natural Theology, or at all events the objection which comes second to the absence of those intellectual and adaptorial views, on the large scale, which ought to take the lead in every such work, is, that it is of too anatomical a character, and represents Man more as a piece of ingenious mechanism, than as a being possessing life, endowed with an immortal spirit, organised in subservience to that spirit, capable of doing much good and arriving at much eminence, and confident in the full assurance of eternal mental enjoyment when the sun of this world has, to him, set for ever.

We admire the mechanism, — as who that runs the parallel with the works of man can fail to admire it ? but truly this is a humble tribute of admiring adoration to Him, who spake, and those bones were instantly perfect in all their parts, clothed with all their integuments, and the whole in healthy and vigorous action. That "breath of life," which, as is revealed to us, " the Lord God breathed into the nostrils of man," and of no other sublunary creature, must, even as it is displayed through the medium of the body, always be both the highest and most delightful part of the study of human nature, and the most striking illustration of the power, wisdom, and goodness of the Creator, that can be drawn from his works.

PROPER KNOWLEDCF, OF MAN. 6

If we are endowed with the proper spirit, that which we first and chiefly desire to promote and participate in, must be what has brought the naked, houseless, and ignorant savage ouC of his cave, clothed him in purple and fine linen, set him upon the throne of the earth, and given understanding to his mind and dexterity to his hand, till eveiy land has been traversed by his foot, the waters of every ocean have been divided by his keel, and the glance of his eye has carried the line and the balance full eighteen hundred millions of miles into the depths of space, to fetch thence intelligence of a world more magnificent than ours, and the which world, distant as it is, is only as the threshold of that mighty temple which God in his goodness has been pleased to permit us to contemplate.

The grand knowledge of Man, viewed as a subject of general study, is that of the means and the mode by which the race have come to that state in which we find them ; and how their career may be continued at an accelerated rate : and, when we bring this home to ourselves as a personal matter, it is reduced in extent and shortened in time, but in its essential nature it is still the same, — by what means have we been brought to our present state ? and how shall we improve that state, and become wiser and happier every day 1

Now, mere definition, demonstration, and description of organization, how useful soever they may be for their own peculiar pui-poses, are of comparatively little use to us in this grand inquiry ; and if we allow ourselves to be diverted from it by them, we resemble

b3

6 LIA'ING MAN

travellers who loiter by the way-side in culling wild flowers and gathering pebbles, which amuse the fancy but retard the journey. If we open the tumuli upon a battle-field, in which leader and led have been hastily entombed together in one promiscuous heap, it is in vain that we attempt to distinguish the bones of the commander from those of the humblest individual that he led on to the carnage, or take up the bone of one arm and say, " This wielded the weapon of a hero," and another and respond, " This fell powerless by the side of a coward." The dead have no tale to tell, even from the instant that the breath is extinct, and before the expression of the last pang, and the quivering of the parting struggle, have subsided into the stillness of that clay-cold image which sorrowing friends consign to its parent earth, sometimes with pomp and ceremony, which bitterly mock that mortality which they are intended to honour, but cannot.

If we would know more of the man, we must seek for it among the living, not among the dead ; and whether sepulchral marble, formed with the most exquisite art, and all but breathing into life, or the oozy deeps of the ocean, shall cover his mortal remains, his real monument is taken up in the current of human improvement in the exact ratio of the real good that he contributed to produce, whether the crowd of his day sounded the trumpet of fame before him, or yelled in detraction at his heels, or did sometimes the one and sometimes the other.

The man respecting whom we seek that general knowledge which is to be really useful to us as mem-

MUST RE STUDIED. 7

bers of society, is not the man of the anatomist, for lie is a mere body, and the study of him is but the study of matter, and not even of living matter. As little is it the man of the systematic zoologist, for while the former is body without life, this one is the living animal without mind. Nor will the man which the intellectual philosopher labours to set before us answer our purpose better. He has something that the others want, but he also wants something which they have. Nay, even if we could combine and generalize all the three, our result would be all too narrow for what the case demands. In this public and general knowledge of Man, we wish to include the originating impulse, and the means of all that has been known, and all that has been done, because without this we may, in our efforts at improvement, omit the very circumstance which would give that improvement effect and value. The attainment of this, or anything like this, is impossible ; but still we may have our faces directed to it, and thereby advance a little way.

In our own individual case — intimately as we may suppose ourselves acquainted with that, we have difficulties of a similar kind ; only the magnitude of them is reduced to very little in comparison — to one individual as compared with the whole race, and to a portion of a single life as compared with the whole period of human histoiy. In respect to their historic periods, short as the one is in comparison with the other, the history of the individual has a remarkable coincidence with the history of the race. We cannot trace the origin of language or the first dawnings of

8 OBSCURE BEGINNINGS.

knowledge, either in the pages of the record of antiquity, or in the accounts given by voyagers, since navigation has discovered and explored those places of the earth which seas, deserts, or impassable ridges of mountains, had, up to the time of their modem discovery, cut off from any participation in that knowledge and civilisation to which our o\mi history belongs. The beginnings among many of them were rude ; but in every one there was a beginning, and a beginning of the origin of which they themselves could give no account. There was always a language, and the use of fire, and weapons, of some sort or other, both for the capture of fish and other animals for food, and for combats between tribe and tribe. It is worthy of remark, too, that among these rude nations, improvement appeared most completely at a stand where it seemed to have made the least advance in former time — to be, so to speak, nearest to its first or rudimental state. Thus, infant civilisation is no evidence of a young nation, but rather the reverse. The j'oung races, in all countries where a remnant of an earlier population remains unmixed, are always the more advanced in knowledge and civilisation. In the Oriental isles, the blacks, who still are found in many of the central forests, are certainly an older people there than the Malays of the coasts, but they are not so civilised ; and they display far less intellect. It is the same in those parts of the Eastern continent in which a remnant of an earlier 'population is to be found in the fastnesses of the mountains or other situations, which the immigrants have not felt disposed to pay the price of

OF CIVILISATION. 9

occupying. In America it is still the same ; and, independently of the inferiority of the natives generally to the European settlers and their dependants, wherever a travelled native population have come, they are always, in some degree, superior to the race which they have displaced. ^\'e can readily understand why, at the time of the arrival of the new inhabitants, they should have been superior to the old ; for if they had not, they would have been the conquered and not the conquerors. Thus, it seems to be a general law of human society, that the people who are the oldest, that is, who have been the longest in any locality, are ever the lowest in the scale of civilisation.

The subversion of the Roman empire by the people of the North, the barbarians, as they are called, is a nominal exception to this, but not a real one. They were called " barbarians," that is, " bearded men," and acts of cruelty perpetrated by them are recorded, probably with many exaggerations : but if we could get at the real facts, there seems little reason to doubt that we should find ample proofs of their being far superior in intellectual energy,-, as well as in bodily vigour and endurance, and in all the higher attributes of the human character, how much soever these may have been dashed and debased by rudeness, to the degenerated and efi"eminate Romans. In our own country, there is no question that the Saxons were superior in intellectual energy to the Britons whom thev dispossessed ; that the Catti, and other continental tribes that took possession of the eastern

10 OUR OWN IGNORANCE.

coasts and eastern islands of Scotland, were superior to the native Celts that gave way before them ; and that the Norwegian adventurers, who became the chiefs of the clans in the West Highlands and isles, and gave their names to the clans, were superior to the natives over whom they gained such an ascendancy.

Thus, turn where we may upon the globe, we cannot reach so far back as the time of the invention of language, or the first introduction of those arts which distinguish men, even in their lowest states, from the other living creatures. In our individual case it is much the same. We cannot carry our memory back to the time when we learned to speak, or detail the means by which we acquired the use of that grand means for the communicating and perpetuation of knowledge. Much less can we tell when we first began to feel and to think ; and, therefore, our intellectual origin, like that of nations, and of the whole race, is involved in obscurity. This is another difficulty in the way of our knowledge of Man, whether we take that knowledge as general, or as particular, and applicable to our own case.

There is another circumstance connected -wath our individual knowledge of ourselves, which must not be lost sight of. The individual that we must know is not the same that is known to the public generally, in the case of our being so known at all, or even to our familiar friends. What we appear, in the former of those cases, is in a great measure put on, whether we are aware that it is so or not ; and, even in the latter,

THE SECRET CHARACTER.

there is a dark closet in the character into which our most intimate and endeared friend is never permitted to look. It may be well, certainly it is well, that such is the case ; for if our minds were denuded of all covering of prudence, " the shame of our nakedness " would morally appear as olfensive to the world around us, and as injurious to ourselves, as would be the case if we went about physically denuded of our garments. This is not hypocrisy ; but may be, and often is, an opposite, and, consequently, an estimable feeling. ^\'e have really no control over the trains of our thought. We cannot will them, for the one succeeds the other in a manner over which we have no control ; and if two subjects are communicated by the senses, or arise in the mind from suggestion, we can no more help feeling the relation that subsists between them than we can help feeling pain in our finger when it is stung by a hornet, or comes in contact with a live