There are, besides, connected with medicine, some departments
of thought and study peculiarly exciting to the imagination. Such is
anatomy, with its sad yet instructive revelations of the structure
of the human frame--so "fearfully and wonderfully made"--wielding in
its hand a scalpel which at first seems ruthless and disenchanting
as the scythe of death, but which afterwards becomes a key to unlock
some of the deepest mysteries, and leads us down whole galleries of
wonder. There is botany, culling from every nook and corner of the
earth weeds which are flowers, and flowers of all hues, and every
plant, from the "cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop which springs out of
the wall," and finding a terrible and imaginative pleasure in
handling the fell family of poisons, and in deriving the means of
protracting life and healing sickness from the very blossoms of death.
And there is chemistry, most poetical save astronomy of all the
sciences, seeking to spiritualise the material--to hunt the atom to
the point where it trembles over the gulf of nonentity--to weigh
gases in scales, and the elements in a balance, and, in its more
transcendental and daring shape, trying to interchange one kind of
metal with another, and all kinds of forms with all, as in a
music-led and mystic dance.
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