Discourse on the importance of the study of physiology as a branch of popular education / [John Fletcher].

  • Fletcher, John, 1792-1836
Date:
1836
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Discourse on the importance of the study of physiology as a branch of popular education / [John Fletcher]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    gaged in it at all. With the hackneyed quotations con¬ tinually on our lips, that “ the proper study of mankind is man,” and that “ all our knowledge is ourselves to know,” we have been content for the most part to study anything and everything, rather than the mechanism and actions of that fabric by which we live and move and have our being. From our earliest years we have been inured to the mysteries of grammar and language; we have been instructed in the system of the heavens and the boundaries of the earth; we have been taught all the principalities and powers, ancient and modern— the kingdoms of the earth and the glories of them ; we can tell, perhaps, the year in which every king of every nation began to reign—the era in which every hero was permitted to lay waste the fair face of nature ; we after¬ wards, probably, make some progress in mineralogy, in chemical and mechanical philosophy, and even in botany and zoology—at least we are familiarized with the outward visible signs of plants and animals, “ from the cedar-tree that is in Lebanon, even to the hyssop that springeth out of the wall,” and from the “ huge Le¬ viathan that taketh his pastime in the deep,” to “ the lowest creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth,”— but of these as organized and living beings, and of our¬ selves in the same capacity, we generally remain all this time absolutely and profoundly ignorant. “ Those who hang with ecstasy,” says a late able reviewer, “ over stamens and pistils, and over fragments of granite and spar, never seem to consider how noble and useful a sub¬ ject for contemplation exists in their own frames.” They may understand numerous languages, but they are careless of the origin of a single idea of which language is but the symbol, or of the movements of those organs by which one word is articulated; they may be acquainted with the laws which regulate the motions of the stars through the boundless regions of space, but they are totally ig¬ norant of those which direct the movements of the little globe of the eye through the tiny segment of a circle, which it describes in following their course ; they may know the limits of the earth, but with respect to the