a perfect system of supply, going hand in hand together through all the stages of human life. In the perfected condition of the adult, whatever particle is removed is supplied by one exactly like it. In the periods of progressive growth there is a gradual improvement in each new formation; while, as age advances, there is a gradual degeneracy in new tissue, showing the lowering type of senile vitality, and the approaching end of the individual. The tissues then become less and less animalized, more and more inorganic; until at last the man "goeth to his long home." Amidst all these changes, whatever is removed from a living body ceases to be animalized, and passes off either in the form of vapour, as in respiration, or in the form of fluid, as in the salivary secretion, the perspiration, and in other forms. The amount of invisible matter constantly passing from the human body is very great, and consists simply of minute portions, which, having done their work, are dismissed by the master-workman, secretion, and are allowed to pass into the surrounding atmosphere, there to aid in the structure of new animal and vegetable formations. Thus the human body is in a state of constant change; of change so active, that there are physiologists who consider that every atom of the least changeable part of our hodies (the bones) is changed at least once a year, and other parts much more frequently.

The proofs of this change may be found in the following facts. We see some parts of our frames constantly parting with organic matter, in the form of nails, hair, perspiration, and the like. The sense of smell te ls us that the skin is constantly parting with eruric; for there is always au odour in rooms occupied by a number of people. A dog can recognise the smell of his master's body for hours after he has passed a given place. People wonder why they need to be constantly washing their hands. It is because their skin is constantly exfoliating, and parting with a secretion, the perspiration, with other débris or "used up" portions of animal tissue. The moisture that lines all the interior tubes and cavities of the human body is being constantly removed by heat and exhalation. A human body weighing two hundred pounds contains one hundred pounds by weight of water, which is, at all times, a changing element. The amount of fluid removed by the liver and by the skin is very great, and so is the amount removed by the lungs in the act of respiration. Unless these and other organs are in a condition to free the blood of wasted or effete materials, the man will soon die.

As our tissues in turn become exuviated and removed into the air around, every element of them finds its place, so as sooner or later to garnish and support some portions of the organisms, animal or vegetable, of this fair and beautiful world. Some of the hydrogen which escapes from us helps to form ammonia, and all the elements of our bodies promote the growth of plants. Estimating the amount of carbon escaping from our bodies at fourteen ounces per day, (which is Herapath's estimate for a man of fuil habit; instead of ten, which is the lowest estimate,) a man evolves during a life of seventy years so much carbon, or charcoal, as would form two

ordinary-sized oak-trees, weighing five tons each. Herapath tells us that about two hundred and fifty people evolve during a year enough hydrofluoric acid to dissolve half a hundredweight of glass, or to darken all the windows of the Crystal Palace. The loss in phosphorus alone yearly would do something, if properly used, towards "setting the Thames on fire.” Part of our breath is hydrogen; and if, as it escapes, it could be made to combine in certain proportions with the oxygen and carbon around, we should have people exhaling distilled water and balloon gas, instead of a very small quantity of hydrogen, and a large quantity of the poisonous gas which we call carbonic acid. Thus the human breath is a poison, so different is plain honest fact from poetical authority. Beauty and decay are in life so linked together, that it is only under impassioned emotion that we ever pronounce

"The cheek to outvie the peach's bloom,

The breath the hyacinth's perfume."

The subjects of such similes are all of them only interesting forms of composition and of decomposition, flickering and dissolving shapes of matter, elemental dross and mouldering clay.

The marvellous fact is, that in perfect health we are not conscious of these changes, and that we learn them only by reason and observation. It is a mistake to suppose that we carry the same bodies with us day by day. We are the same, but our bodies are not. The mind, which is the test and measure of the man," untouched by these mere bodily states, sits unmoved amidst them all. Some metaphysicians have felt this difficulty so much, that they have made man's identity to consist in some special part of his body which has been supposed not to change.* Thus Dr. Watts

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* As meeting certain questions which will here, perhaps, be suggested to our readers, we quote a portion of the article "Resurrection,"-Watson's " Theological Dictionary :""That the same body which was laid in the grave shall arise out of it, is the manifest doctrine of the Scriptures. The notion of an incorruptible germ, or that of an original and unchangeable stamen, out of which a new and glorious body, at the resurrection, is to spring, appears to have been borrowed from the speculations of some of the Jewish Rabbins. But if by this hypothesis it was designed to remove the difficulty of conceiving how the scattered parts of one body could be preserved from becoming integral parts of other bodies, it supposes that the constant care of Providence is exerted to maintain the incorruptibility of those individual germs, or stamina, so as to prevent their assimilation with each other. Now, if they have this by original quality, then the same quality may just as easily be supposed to appertain to every particle which composes a human body; so that, though it be used for food, it shall not be capable of assimilation, in any circumstances, with another body. But if these germs, or stamina, have not this quality by their original nature, they can only be prevented from assimilating with each other by that operation of God which is present to all His works, and which must always be directed to secure the execution of His own ultimate designs. If this view be adopted, then, if the resort must at last be to the superintendence of a Being of infinite power and wisdom, there is no greater difficulty in supposing that His care to secure this object may extend to a million as easily as to a hundred particles of matter......The question here is one

places it in the semilunar ganglion, or in some of the adjoining viscera. Drew wrote a book, the gist of which was to place it in one of the bones of the spine. Descartes places man's identity in the pineal gland. Of our own consciousness, and of the consciousness of the lower animals, we can have no conception. Our consciousness tells us that we are not what we seem, mere flesh and b'ood. This is my arm, that is my foot. My blood is not my life, but it is mine; and I call my body mine, not me. It is my present home, and, like all other homes, its materials are constantly changing, although I remain the same, distinct as is the swimmer from the river in which he bathes, or the jewel which lies amid the mouldering and changing rubbish of the sea-drift.-Put the facts in the following order, and you will see a corollary fairly deducible from them. The body is constantly undergoing change in all its parts. Probably no person at the age of twenty has one single particle in his body which he had at the age of ten; and still less does any portion of the body with which he was born continue to exist in or with him. All has now entered into new combinations, forming parts of other men, or of animals, or vegetables, or of mineral substances, exactly as the body he dies with will be resolved into new combinations after his death. Yet the mind continues one and the same. Here are no particles to be resolved or dispersed; for it is one and single, and remains unchanged by the changes of the body. As far as the mere removal of materials bears on the question, death itself does not more materially resolve the body into its elements, and form it into new con.binations, than fifteen or twenty years destroy it by like resolution and combination. And yet the mind lives on, discarding one material habitation after another, each of which undergoes what may be termed a chronic death. As far as mere reason can go on so mysterious a subject, we cannot have better proof of the impassable distinction between body and mind. It prepares us for the clearer light and firm authority with which life and immortality are brought before us by Inspiration.

In describing the waste and supply constantly going on in the human system, we must not omit the changes which occur in the purification of the blood. These are effected by the contact of the air with the capillaries of the pulmonary arteries, as they lie uncovered on the elastic tissue connecting the lung cells. In this act carbonic acid is secreted from the blood; so that respiration may, as Dr. Carpenter justly says, be looked on as one of the modifications of secretion. Hydrogen escapes in small quantities along

which simply respects the frustrating a final purpose of the Almighty by an operation of nature.

"It may be objected that if our bodies have in fact undergone successive changes during life, the bodies in which we have sinned or performed rewardable actions may not be, in many instances, the same bodies as those which will be actually rewarded or punished.' We answer, that rewards and punishments have their relation to the body, not so much as it is the subject, but as it is the instrument, of reward and punishment. It is the soul only which perceives pain or pleasure, which suffers or enjoys, and is, therefore, the only rewardable suꞌject."

with watery vapour. The panes of glass in a room, after a party has been in it for some hours on a cold night, are covered, on their interior surface, with either water or ice, according to the temperature without; the cold exterior surface of the glass having acted as a condenser of the watery vapour within,—a vapour which is one of the results of respiration.

(To be concluded.)

FREE-WILL.

THE Christian world is indebted to an American theologian for an admirable work on the freedom of the will.* The reasoning is too close and the style too minutely scientific and compact, for it here to be n ade the subject of analytical review but we will set down, as briefly and as clearly as we can, the principal definitions and a few of the chief points in his argument against the Calvinistic doctrine of necessity.

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The operations of the human mind are classified into intellections, sensibilities, and volitions. By intellect, the soul takes cognizance of all things, material or immaterial, external or internal, moral or unethical. By sensibility, the soul experiences feelings, emotions, and desires. By will, the soul "consciously becomes the intentional author of external action,— external, that is, to the will itself,-whether of mind or body." The perceptions of intellect and sensibility are caused by the objects presented to them. "Will is the power of the soul by which it is the conscious author of an intentional act ;" and thus it is evidently a different faculty from any other in the mind, distinguished and characterized by intention and by The will is the faculty. Volition is the act. Soul-self-the ego-as possessing the faculty, is the agent; and this agent is free, not acting under co-action or necessity. It is by the possession of this faculty that man becomes an agent in the world, exists under the weight of moral obligation, and is responsible for his volitions and voluntary actions.

motive.

The Will, it is maintained, is free, and freedom is exemption. Or, to speak more clearly, it is free from a volition, as well as free to it. "The clock that strikes is free, not from, but only to the stroke. The river that flows is free to the current, but not from." This is mere mechanical freedom, and rather to be called necessity. A slave resembles the piece of mechanism; and to speak of his "freedom to labour is, in reality, to describe his abject and utter bondage. He is not free from labour, and therefore is not free at all; but the human will, being, at the same time, free from any conceivable volition, and also free to its opposite, is absolutely free. Necessitarians never get beyond that sole freedom to the act or state which belongs to mechanics and mathematics; and it is against them that our author wields his argument with a force which may be

The Freedom of the Will, as a Basis of Human Responsibility and a Divine Government: Elucidated and maintained in its Issue with the Necessitarian Theories of Hobbes, Edwards, the Princeton Essayists, and other leading advocates. By D. D. Whedon, D.D. New York: Carlton and Porter.

confidently described as resistless. Necessitarians, indeed, admit a certain freedom of the will; but they distinguish between a natural and a moral liberty, which distinction is pronounced irrelevant and false; for a man may, according to their theory, have the former, and yet not the latter. If he has full power to will as he pleases, but lacks the moral power to please to will, his volition is not free, and at this point rises the great question. The power to put forth a volition, Dr. Whedon maintains, is moral, not emotional; the impulse to the volition may be quite distinct from the stimulus of a desire; the soul may determine to act against the strongest current of desire, and in contradiction to the most clamorous demands of passion. The freedom of the will, therefore, is moral, and not merely natural.

"Freedom of the will, as distinguished from necessity, is usually defined to be that power by which it may put forth either of several volitions; or, in causational terms, that property of the volitional cause by which it produces several possible effects. It is an either-causal power." Or, to state the distinction more simply a mechanical or natural cause produces but one effect; for in the machine, or the animal, reason and morals have no place : but, in the man, the cause of a volition, and, remotely, of a voluntary action, produces such effect as the will may determine: one volition instead of one other, or instead of many others, since, being free to any one, to the exclusion of all others, it remains for the will to determine what volition it will put forth; and here comes the consideration of Cause, Power Necessity, and Certainty, and on each of these Dr. Whedon treats very fully.

But President Edwards and the Necessitarians demand satisfaction on certain questions which they imagine the Freedomists must fail to give. They ask, First, What causes the Will to act? Secondly, What causes it to put forth the particular volition rather than another? Thirdly, Why is it that the volition for which we say there was an adequate cause does not take effect? Fourthly, What causes this contingent diversity of happenings? Dr. Whedon answers to this effect. 1. The Will acts, because every agent in a condition to act is under the general necessity of action. 2. The Will, in its very nature, has the power of choice between alternatives; and because it is in its nature to choose, it chooses. 3. The third question is trifling; for the choice of one alternative necessitates the non-choice of every other. 4. The fourth scarcely can be answered, except by a retort; by replying to the necessitarian, that if, according to his theory, every cause must not only be potential to an effect, but not alternative, and resultant in one effect to the exclusion of every other, how does the Necessitarian account for this alleged uniformity of result,—“ What necessitates necessity?" He cannot account for it.

From the causational argument Dr. Whedon passes to the psychological, from the consideration of the nature of causes to that of the influence of motives; and arrives at the following results :

"1. The apparent contingencies of human action are explained, being verified by their bases in the very nature of Will. Human behaviours are truly to our eye, externally or phenomenally, made up of certainties