without the law, as appetite and caprice may dictate, and suffer pain and disease.

This law of adapting our food to the wants of nutrition and the powers of digestion is daily violated. Some task their digestive organs to weariness and disorder. They are overloaded and heavy. Their nervous energies are all absorbed in the single process of converting food into flesh, and they have therefore but little activity of mind or energy of body. The slaves of appetite, they openly live to eat; and practically eat to die. These are gourmands, whose sensual lives seem to strike us with horror. But there are thousands among us, who violate the same law, and are suffering similar consequences. Their sin and their punishment differ from those of the sensualist only in degree but not in kind. Those hardy men, who know not what they eat and care not what is offered them and yet are occasionally oppressed—those kind men, who sacrifice their comfortable digestion rather than give their provider pain, by requesting their food to be adapted to their powers those, who partake of extraordinary dinners and night suppers-all these violate this law of life. The stoic, who denies his appetite every gratification, and the epicure, whose palate is his ruling principle, both sin against the same command, though from opposite motives. Whenever we are induced to eat that which is not wanted to nourish the body, or which is not perfectly within the power of the stomach to digest, so far as this gives trouble or is ill suited to the wants of the system, we violate the law. In every case, the punishment of pain, disease, or languor is the consequence of the error, and is proportioned to its amount.

The law of muscular exercise is given to us in general terms, and it is left to our discernment to know the manner and the quantity. Yet, in an appropriate degree, it is absolutely necessary. It is manifest from too many examples, that, without it, there can be no fulness of life, and that the excess of it is weariness and exhaustion and partial death. It is also certain, that this exercise should be regular and unfailing. If we wish to gain for ourselves the fullest advantage from this, we must not concentrate the physical labor of many days in one, and have long periods of inactivity after it. For those, who are engaged in sedentary employments, each day should have its own exercise abroad: and for the laborious, each day should

have no more than its own. It is the business of the first to determine, how much he needs, of the second to ascertain how much he can bear, and of both to keep within the proper medium.

Notwithstanding this law is published and imperative, we see transgressions against it, of every sort and degree. We see men and women confining themselves to their houses and their rooms for days, or even weeks together, thinking their nutrition will go on of itself without their aid, and endeavoring to carry on their mental operations, with their usual vigor. The ambitious student hopes to gain time for his books, by shortening the hours of his walks in open air, or perhaps by cutting them off altogether. The book-keeper attempts to stand at his desk, and the tailor and the shoemaker to work at his bench all the hours of the day, which are not absolutely required for eating and sleeping. Some of these transgress more, some trangress less against the law; but all are offenders, and all suffer the sure retribution commensurate with their sin.

The over anxious mother guards her daughters with injudicious care. In her notions of female education, fatigue is a stumbling-block, and the weather a bugbear. Her girls are restrained from exercise, and grow up inactive and feeble. The power of their limbs is never called forth, and the strength of their whole frames is not developed. The energies of the digestive and circulatory and nervous systems, correspond to those of the muscular. All that portion of life, which consists in action, courage, and command of their physical and moral powers, has never been born. Their listless days drag heavily onward; they have a quantity of existence less than their latent powers might have given them, if they had been called into exercise. Perhaps they call this life, but it is comparatively feeble and attenuated, and it is so much the more liable to be shortened as the vital principle within them is lower.

Others violate this law in the opposite extreme of over exertion, considering their muscular system as having an indefinite power of endurance; they make long days and short nights, and grudge the hours required for eating and rest. For a time, they accomplish more physical labor than their fellows, and take satisfaction in their superior industry, thinking that this extraordinary exertion may be maintained until natural

old age shall come upon them. But all their excessive toil is only borrowing life and power from days to come, which they must surely repay, and this, with usurious interest. Those days find them exhausted and weak; and if they persevere in their undue exertions, premature old age comes upon them. Then in the midst of their years, they are decrepit and useless, because they have squandered their strength, and are now suffering the consequences of their improvidence.

The same is true in regard to any unwise expenditure of physical or intellectual power, for however short periods. Any borrowing of the future is bad economy; one day or one week of extraordinary action must be followed by more than a day or a week of extraordinary inactivity; the loss is ever greater than the gain; and man accomplishes less by irregular labor, than by that systematic industry, which expends on each day its own strength and no more, without ever encroaching upon the

morrow.

The day is the time for labor and the night is the time for rest. This is the universal law of nature. It is the command

to man. Yet we have, partially at least, assumed to be wiser than He, who created us and made also the day and the night. We often reverse his law; and turn night into day, and day into night. We sleep, while the sun is shining with life-giving beams, and labor under the deathful influences of darkness. Thus we are exhausted more and refreshed less. Life and power are not maintained to their highest degree, and we are more susceptible of disease and pain.

It is a cruel and a selfish as well as most unwise hope, to gain by adding night work to day toil, in ourselves or in those who labor for us. Sooner or later, this will waste the energies of the body, and impoverish the spirit, and we must then suspend our exertions or sink beneath the vain endeavor to do more than God has given us power to do.

Some seem to suppose, that although they would not transgress so far as to labor in the night, yet they may work six days in the week and devote one night to pleasure, to charity, or to the acquisition of knowledge, and suffer no depreciation of life. But the law is inexorable, it demands perfect and and implicit obedience; and he who deprives himself of the natural rest, from whatever cause, must suffer the loss of some of his natural vigor, and lay a tax, greater or less in proportion to the delinquency, upon his permanent constitution.

The skin stands in need of our aid in the performance of its double duty. It is not a mere passive membrane through which the perspiration and other excretions pass out from the body; nor is it a dead covering like a garment to keep the cold elements from us. But, in each of these relations it performs an active and a living part; and does its office best, when its vital principle is the strongest. The waste, that is thrown off from the body by this covering is sometimes vapour, sometimes fluid, and there is also a waxy secretion from the surface. These keep the skin moist, so that dust gathers and mingles with them, and together they choke the pores and the mouths of the glands and interrupt their functions, and hence the skin becomes sluggish and performs its part imperfectly in the animal economy, and the whole frame is heavy and life is impaired.

We have then a duty in this matter. Friction and washing would relieve the surface of this accumulated load, and let it go on rejoicing in its work. This is our law, but so plainly necessary and so surely comfortable an act of obedience is not generally rendered. We do this indeed for the hands and the face, but these we wash to be seen of men, while the residue of skin is full of all uncleanness. Very few purify themselves throughout with a daily bath. Some indulge themselves with this as an occasional luxury. But the great majority of mankind feel no responsibility for the health of this organ, and from summer to summer, they carry upon themselves the corrupting waste that has ceased to live; and the gathered filth of months or years remains upon the skin, a deadening clog upon the vital operations.

The direct consequences of this neglect of duty, appear in many of the cutaneous eruptions, the leprous spots upon the filthy; and in such a reduction of the vital properties of the surface that it is less able to protect the body from the external cold. Then the waste is not freely carried off, the blood circulates less freely in the skin, and is therefore thrown upon the inner organs, and their functions are thereby interrupted.

Our natural defence against the elements is greater or less in proportion to the vital energy of the skin. This power is a matter of development and growth not of entire and original creation. Like the strength of the muscles, it increases by use and diminishes by neglect. Hence we find the skin of the face, which is never covered, needs no protection, because its powers have been taxed and brought forth; while the skin of

the breast can scarcely endure a temperature below summer heat without covering. So also the timid, who confine themselves to hot rooms, are chilled when they go into the open air of winter; while stagemen, pilots, and wagoners endure the severest weather with impunity and comfort. The cutaneous energies are reduced down to the level of the demands that are made upon them, however low; and nearly raised up to them, however high. If, therefore, we accustom ourselves to abundant clothing, we soon find we need it; and if we wear comparatively light garments, the skin will make vigorous exertions to do that which we do not. Two men may be walking, side by side, in winter; one has his daily cold bath, and wears only his close dress; the other abhors water, but puts on extra garments. Both are equally warm; the first by his vital energies; the second by his artificial covering.

Not only is present comfort better maintained by the proper administration of the skin, but we have therein a much surer safeguard against the effects of atmospheric changes. The cherished health and proper use of this organ, give elasticity to its quick discerning energies. These spring forward to defend the flesh against any sudden assault from without. Colds, rheumatism, and coughs are not the frequent attendants upon those who live ever in open air and meet all its variations; but they follow the over cautious, whose timidity has only weakened their natural powers of resisting the causes of derangement.

These are some of the most important organs of our frame, and these some of the essential conditions of their existence. No one of them is the seat of life to the exclusion of the rest; but any one may be the seat of death and include all the others in its downfall.

God has created this beautiful frame, with its hundreds of muscles and bones, its thousands of blood vessels and nerves, its complicated digestive apparatus, its nicely adapted lungs, its active skin, - all these he has formed into and systems organs, each having a separate duty to perform for the good of the whole; each doing its own peculiar work; and yet not working without the coöperation of all the rest, and the whole under the direction of the brain and nervous system. All these, varied and harmonious, constitute the machinery of our life. And this God has put into our hands to direct, to supply its wants, to suit the elements of nutrition and excretion, food and air, bathing and exercise, precisely to the necessities and condition VOL XXXV. 3D S. VOL. XVII. NO. I.

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