Complete Project Gutenberg Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. Works eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 4,188 pages of information about Complete Project Gutenberg Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. Works.

Complete Project Gutenberg Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. Works eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 4,188 pages of information about Complete Project Gutenberg Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. Works.

To the chemist and the microscopist the living body presents the same difficulties, arising from the fact that everything is in perpetual change in the organism.  The fibrine of the blood puzzles the one as much as its globules puzzle the other.  The difference between the branches of science which deal with space only, and those which deal with space and time, is this:  we have no glasses that can magnify time.  The figure I here show you a was photographed from an object (pleurosigma angulatum) magnified a thousand diameters, or presenting a million times its natural surface.  This other figure of the same object, enlarged from the one just shown, is magnified seven thousand diameters, or forty-nine million times in surface.  When we can make the forty-nine millionth of a second as long as its integer, physiology and chemistry will approach nearer the completeness of anatomy.

Our reverence becomes more worthy, or, if you will, less unworthy of its Infinite Object in proportion as our intelligence is lifted and expanded to a higher and broader understanding of the Divine methods of action.  If Galen called his heathen readers to admire, the power, the wisdom, the providence, the goodness of the “Framer of the animal body,”—­if Mr. Boyle, the student of nature, as Addison and that friend of his who had known him for forty years tell us, never uttered the name of the Supreme Being without making a distinct pause in his speech, in token of his devout recognition of its awful meaning,—­surely we, who inherit the accumulated wisdom of nearly two hundred years since the time of the British philosopher, and of almost two thousand since the Greek physician, may well lift our thoughts from the works we study to their great Artificer.  These wonderful discoveries which we owe to that mighty little instrument, the telescope of the inner firmament with all its included worlds; these simple formulae by which we condense the observations of a generation in a single axiom; these logical analyses by which we fence out the ignorance we cannot reclaim, and fix the limits of our knowledge,—­all lead us up to the inspiration of the Almighty, which gives understanding to the world’s great teachers.  To fear science or knowledge, lest it disturb our old beliefs, is to fear the influx of the Divine wisdom into the souls of our fellow-men; for what is science but the piecemeal revelation,—­uncovering,—­of the plan of creation, by the agency of those chosen prophets of nature whom God has illuminated from the central light of truth for that single purpose?

The studies which we have glanced at are preliminary in your education to the practical arts which make use of them,—­the arts of healing,—­surgery and medicine.  The more you examine the structure of the organs and the laws of life, the more you will find how resolutely each of the cell-republics which make up the E pluribus unum of the body maintains its independence.  Guard it, feed it, air it, warm

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