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True Nature and Character of a School.

and while internal and external improvement is every where progressing, should fail to accomplish the purposes for which it was and should be designed; the education of the children of our citizens from three to seven years of age. The truth is-we may as well confess it honestly as not-we have nothing among us, beyond the family circle, which deserves the name of education; and even much of the latter is bad education. The school should be, for the time, a substitute for the family circle. There should be, in reality, but one school. What is taught and done at home, if worthy of being taught at all, whether it bear upon the physical, the social, the intellectual or the moral characterwith the exception, perhaps, for the most part, of eating and sleeping-should, as a general rule, be taught and done at the school room; and vice versa, what is taught and done at the school room should be taught and done in the family circle. A school is an adjourned meeting of the family; but to give time to the parents, individually, to attend to other things which demand their attention, several families of children are united at the adjourned meeting, and a single confidential father and mother are (or should be) allowed to take the place, for the time being, of the whole. When the hours allotted to the meeting are over, it is adjourned back to the family, where the work of education is to go on again as before, only with renewed vigor. This, in few words, in the simple idea of a school. It is, like a family, a place of education-the formation of character and habits--and not a place of mere instruction; it is a mere substitute for the family circle and the family course of study.

In saying what we have now said, we go a step farther than before. Hitherto we have called the family school, the model school; and have insisted that in proportion as all other schools could be made to resemble this, in the number and character of their teachers, pupils, rooms, &c. &c., just in the same proportion, were they what schools ought to be, might we hope to accomplish the great end of education. Now, as will be seen, we take the ground that the family school is properly the only school; and all things else which are called schools, are only continuations or modifications of it. This view, if just, and if universally received, would effect many important changes in the character and condition of all our systems of instruction, from the infant to the man, and from the family to the university.

Circulation of the Blood.

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PRACTICAL LESSONS IN PHYSIOLOGY.

THE knowledge of our own structure, and of the laws which prevail in us, is beginning to attract considerable attention. The question is often asked us; What class book in Anatomy and Physiology is there which is adapted to pupils of ten, twelve, or fourteen years of age? The only reply we can give is, that we do not know. The House I live in,' is used in a few of our schools, to prepare the way for an elementary work of the kind demanded; but it is little more than an introduction to the subjects of which it treats.-It seems to be most useful as a text book in reading. But beyond this, we have nothing adapted to the class of pupils in question. The works of Hayward, Smith and Combe, are too elaborate, if not too learned.

If teachers were familiar with the whole subject of Anatomy, Physiology, Pathology and Hygiene, this matter might easily enough be managed, even without books. No subjects are more easily taught orally, than anatomy and physiology; not indeed, thoroughly, but to a certain extent. The presence of the living, moving, breathing body, is no inapt substitute for class books, as well as for preparations, models and skeletons. But until people have had their attention early directed to this subject, they will not be likely to make very efficient teachers, even with the living body-fearfully and wonderfully wrought as it isconstantly before them.

It has seemed desirable to present a series of practical lessons. in physiology in this journal. The series is intended for two great classes of the community, parents and teachers. Not that any individual of either of these classes will adopt the lessons for his own use; our hope is rather that they will excite his attention to the subjects embraced in the lessons, and lead him to originate exercises adapted to his own condition, and the wants of his children or pupils. Let the parent or teacher begin, not with our subjects or lessons, unless he understands them, but with something that he does understand. In doing this, if our method of treating these subjects should afford any useful hints, we shall rejoice. We have addressed our lessons to children.

No. 1. THE CIRCULATION.

Each one of you, my young friends, must needs have felt your heart beat; and some of you have probably been anxious to know what made it beat, and why it should be always beating, as long as we live. I am glad to see the young anxious to inquire into these things. I love the boy, who, on seeing the

128 The Process of Circulation Explained.

pendulum of a clock swing, or its hands move, or who on seeing the motion of the hands of a watch and hearing it tick, wishes to know the reason why; although I do not like to see him take a stone and beat a watch to pieces to find out why it ticks or beats, as a boy once did in my native town. But curiosity in the young, and a desire to know the reasons why, in almost every thing, are to be commended; and a curious boy, who is at the same time modest and humble, will almost inevitably become a wise man. If you place your right hand on the left side of your breast, at the lower part of it, directly over the place where the heart lies, and count the number of beats which the heart makes in a minute, by my watch, you will find it, perhaps, eighty or ninety; in some of you more, in others less. In a grown man the heart beats from sixty to seventy times in a minute; in a grown woman, a little more. In children and youth, it beats faster still; and the younger we are, the more swift is the motion.

Now this beating goes on while we are asleep, as well as when we are awake; and unless we faint, or something extraordinary happens, does not stop for a single minute, from our birth to our death. Do you ask what makes it keep going thus? This I cannot tell you. The Creator only knows. But if you ask what good the motion does us, I will try to tell you.

The heart, which in an adult is as large as a man's fist, or larger, has in it two hollows or cavities; and in the instant just before it beats, one of these cavities is full of blood. At the instant when you perceive the beating, it shrinks or contracts, and presses the blood out of it into a long white pipe, called an artery. This contraction of the heart is done with a kind of jerk, or beat, easily perceptible by us all.

This blood, thus pushed into the great artery, makes room for more, and accordingly more flows in. Where this blood which flows in comes from, I cannot stop to tell you now; I must do it hereafter. But when the cavity is full again, which is in a second or less, the heart squeezes it out again into the great artery. The quantity sent out at once by an adult person, is usually estimated at about two ounces, or half a gill; and this fills some eight or ten inches in length of the artery. When therefore, the heart has beat once, we may consider eight inches of the artery as full; when twice, sixteen inches; when thrice, twentyfour inches, &c. Every new portion of blood that is sent out, pushes the previous portion a little farther on, till it is finally sent all over the body.

The blood is not sent all over the body, however, by means of a single pipe or artery. The great artery into which it is first

Beating of the Pulse Explained.

129

pushed, soon divides, somewhat as the trunk of a tree does.First a branch goes off here, then another here; then two or three almost at once; and these branches subdivide, too, till, they are so small that they can hardly be seen by the naked eye. But small as they are, the blood goes from the heart into them all; and in all the larger ones there is a beating perceived, the same as at the heart; and this is what physicians mean when they speak of the pulse. It is a jerk of some branch of the great artery I have spoken of. The physician almost always feels of the branch of the artery which goes along in the wrist, because it comes so near the outside there, that he can find it; whereas most of them go so deep in the flesh that the finger cannot readily feel them.

If any one should express surprise that a jerk should be perceived so far from the heart, I may refer him to the following illustration.

Suppose a long hollow trough or pipe, all the way of a size, were filled with little blocks eight inches long, lying close to each other. Suppose there were a hundred or more of them, and suppose you should push at one end of the row; would they not all be moved alike? And if you should strike one end of the row with a hammer or sledge, so as to produce a shock, would it not be felt quite to the other end of the row in the same instant? Would it not be so, even if the row was a mile long? Just so with what I might call a row or column of liquid substance, as the blood. The heart pushes with a jerk at one end of the column, and the motion and jerk are felt quite to the other extremity, in the very same instant.

I might also illustrate the subject in another way, if you had seen a fire engine, and seen it in operation. The long leather pipes, through which they force their water, might be compared to the great artery of the human body; and the engine itself to the heart. Now, if the pipe or hose that carries the water, is two hundred feet long, it takes a very strong man to hold the end of it, so as to point it exactly right, towards the fire. It jerks with violence, even at the very end of it.

The arteries, that is, the branches of the great artery-are whitish, especially the large ones. Those are not arteries which you see on the surface of the body and limbs, especially of old people; and which look bluish. They are veins. The white pipes or arteries, as I have already told you, lie deeper; and can only be felt at particular places, where, to get around some bone or joint, they come very near the surface.

The veins, indeed, carry the blood in thein; but it is that blood which after having been sent out in the arteries to all parts of

130

Plan for Purifying the Blood.

the body is going back again to the heart, from whence it came. For it is time for you to know that these two processes are going on in us every moment, as long as we live. The heart sends out blood through the arteries, at every contraction; and it goes to the most remote parts of the body. Then having done its work in every part, it runs back again through the veins, and is emptied into the heart. It goes out from the hollow in the left side of the heart, and returns into the hollow on the right side. So that you now begin to see how the heart is constantly supplied with blood to send out; that is to say, how, after it has pressed its contents into the great artery, it gets filled again. But the two hollow cavities in the heart have nothing to do with each other, in a healthy person, any more than if they were two separate hearts. There is no door, nor any sort of direct communication at all between them. How then, you will ask, does the blood that comes back through veins, into the right apartment, get into the left to be sent out again? The question is a fair one, and shall be fully answered.

The blood sent out of the heart, from the left apartment or ventricle, to all parts of the body, through the great artery, is of a bright red, and quite pure; but as it proceeds it becomes impure, in various ways; and when it has got out of the little arteries in the extreme parts of the body into the little veins which lie all around them, it becomes of a dark red; and becomes more and more impure; and the impurity and darkness of color continually increase, till it gets quite back into the right apartment or ventricle of the heart. By this time, it is altogether unfit to be circulated any more in the body. So it is pressed out of the right ventricle of the heart, to which it had arrived through some shorter arteries, into the lungs, or lights, as they are sometimes called, where, by a process which I cannot stop here to describe, the blood is completely purified. As soon as this purifying or cleansing process is completed, it is carried back by short pipes or veins, to the left ventricle of the heart; where it is immediately sent out to all parts of the body, as I have already told you.

I will repeat, briefly, the process; for I wish you to understand it perfectly, before we go any further. The heart contracts with a jerk, and presses the blood of the left ventricle (or cavity) into the great artery, which by its thousand and ten thousand branches, continually distributes it to all parts of the body, even to the extremest ends of the fingers and toes; the small veins then take it up, and, like so many thousands of little streams, run into larger and larger ones, as they proceed towards the heart, into whose right ventricle they at last empty