MUSCULAR MARVELS IN MAN'S ORGANISM.

PHYSIOLOGISTS have found and counted, and have given hard names to, five hundred and twenty-seven distinct structures, called muscles, in the human body. These structures are composed of impressible fibres and delicate tissues; surrounded and interpenetrated, in all parts of the body, by minute vascular conductors and nervous filaments.

For purposes of power, motion, work, and endurance, the muscular system in man is an unspeakable wonder.

Every part and every organ is supplied with muscles. They are so located and adjusted as to support or resist the pressure of weight, sustain harmonious and long-continued locomotion, produce great velocity, and impart unity and energy to all dependent structures. They, too, are double-voluntary and involuntary— acting and reacting, in accordance with the principles of the Soul. They are capable of contraction and expansion, as in the heart, during the sleep of the volition; but, under the influence of the waking will, every muscle is more or less voluntary, and obedient to the movements and determinations of the enthroned mind.

In the muscular system we for the first time meet

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"face to face" with the psychological operations of judgment, affections, and will. Nervons filaments are plentifully showered from the Great Sympathetic Nerve through the entire system of muscles. Elsewhere I have treated of this Nerve as the residence, or, more properly, as the fulcrum, in and upon which Intuition and the correlative principles of Soul and Spirit act and declare their purposes. Arteries and veins, like the bones, seem too remote from Soul to be directly influenced by its principles; but when you behold the muscles, both voluntary and involuntary, covering every organ and bone, and constantly influencing them to motion, life, and sensation, then you find, for the first time, that the Soul, and not the body, is the fountain source of phenomena in the living human temple.

This proposition is substantiated by the constitution of muscle; which is a marvellous assemblage, a bundle, so to speak, of what is called "fasciculi," meaning fibres, of various minute sizes; the whole being freely sup

* "The Harbinger of Health," by the Author, is here referred to. "How to use the Will-power" in disease is fully given under the name of the "Pneumogastric Remedy." The work is a careful, thorough and scientific treatise; entirely free from the use of technical terms, is couched in simple, plain language; its remedies are nature's own; ignoring in toto the drugs, poisons, and learned ignorance of the medical profession.

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plied with both sensative and motive nerve-filaments, and with a cellular membraneous investment, covering and conveying numerous arteries, veins, and the important absorbents. The nerve-communication means that muscles are servants of the mind and its will. untary muscles are mediately, while the voluntary muscles are immediately, reached and influenced by the affections, thoughts, decisions, and will of the spiritual man within. The body has flexors and extensors, because contractive and expansive principles are within the Soul.

To a limited extent, all fish, birds, and animals possess the same principles, and employ them upon the muscles by the same laws of affection and will. They share with man the temporary Soul-existence, but not the immortal Spirit-existence which is what elevates man, interiorly, above the inevitable chemical annihilation consequent upon physical "death."

In many animals the energy and rapidity of muscu

lar motion is greater than in man; while man, through the exercise of his superior reason, invention, and will, can exceed in practical strength, celerity, and endurance, any organization in the lower kingdoms. In the flight of birds, in the speed of fish, the leap of the frog, in the strength of the elephant, in the spring of the lion, more than in man, we behold the wonderful

energy and lightning rapidity of the muscular system. And yet man, by a systematic course of training, under the supervision of his better judgment, and by living, as he can if he wills, in accord with the laws of physiology and hygiene, can lift from three to fifteen times his own weight, can walk from thirty to one hundred miles in twenty-four hours, and can live and move, and enjoy a healthy, harmonious existence on earth full one hundred years!

MARVELS IN MAN'S NERVOUS SYSTEM.

WE now approach the door of the mysterious temple which opens upon man's spiritual existence. We stand now, contemplatively, upon the shore of a wondrous sea; the tides whereof ebb and flow into and from the fountains of the infinite.

Investigators into the realms of "Abiogenesis ”— whether Life has a mechanical or a miraculous origin —may halt just here, and begin their interrogations at the outer gates of the nervous system. Haeckel holds, truly, that "the forms of organisms and of their organs result entirely from their life!" He then proceeds to examine the carbon compounds and the plastic compounds of nature, and finds a structureless protoplasm composed of four inseparable elements-Carbon, Oxygen, Hydrogen, and Nitrogen-from which originated the simplest cells of life. The first cells are called Cytods, having origin in the primordial slime or cellsubstance; and the next development are Plastids, to which without exception and absolutely all so-called vital phenomena are radically bound.

All this in different terms, as the reader is doubtless aware, has been over and again urged in volumes on