“To most of those among us the explanations we are now about to give are entirely superfluous.  But there are some whose chief studies have been in different directions, and who will not complain if certain facts are mentioned which to the expert will seem rudimentary, and which hardly require recapitulation to those who are familiarly acquainted with the common text-books.

“The heart is the centre of every living movement in the higher animals, and in man, furnishing in varying amount, or withholding to a greater or less extent, the needful supplies to all parts of the system.  If its action is diminished to a certain degree, faintness is the immediate consequence; if it is arrested, loss of consciousness; if its action is not soon restored, death, of which fainting plants the white flag, remains in possession of the system.

“How closely the heart is under the influence of the emotions we need not go to science to learn, for all human experience and all literature are overflowing with evidence that shows the extent of this relation.  Scripture is full of it; the heart in Hebrew poetry represents the entire life, we might almost say.  Not less forcible is the language of Shakespeare, as for instance, in ‘Measure for Measure:’ 

  “’Why does my blood thus muster to my heart,
   Making it both unable for itself
   And dispossessing all my other parts
   Of necessary fitness?’

“More especially is the heart associated in every literature with the passion of love.  A famous old story is that of Galen, who was called to the case of a young lady long ailing, and wasting away from some cause the physicians who had already seen her were unable to make out.  The shrewd old practitioner suspected that love was at the bottom of the young lady’s malady.  Many relatives and friends of both sexes, all of them ready with their sympathy, came to see her.  The physician sat by her bedside during one of these visits, and in an easy, natural way took her hand and placed a finger on her pulse.  It beat quietly enough until a certain comely young gentleman entered the apartment, when it suddenly rose infrequency, and at the same moment her hurried breathing, her changing color, pale and flushed by turns, betrayed the profound agitation his presence excited.  This was enough for the sagacious Greek; love was the disease, the cure of which by its like may be claimed as an anticipation of homoeopathy.  In the frontispiece to the fine old ‘Junta’ edition of the works of Galen, you may find among the wood-cuts a representation of the interesting scene, with the title Amantas Dignotio,—­the diagnosis, or recognition, of the lover.

“Love has many languages, but the heart talks through all of them.  The pallid or burning cheek tells of the failing or leaping fountain which gives it color.  The lovers at the ‘Brookside’ could hear each other’s hearts beating.  When Genevieve, in Coleridge’s poem, forgot herself, and was beforehand with her suitor in her sudden embrace,