On the adaptation of external nature to the physical condition of man : principally with reference to the supply of his wants and the exercise of his intellectual faculties / by John Kidd.

Date:: 1833

Credit: On the adaptation of external nature to the physical condition of man : principally with reference to the supply of his wants and the exercise of his intellectual faculties / by John Kidd. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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$r\.~) elevates the brain of an individual of a lower to that of a higher class; though the brain of an individual of a higher is frequently not developed beyond the degree of a lower: and this law of the developernent of the brain is, with reference at least to the distinction of classes, corre- spondent with that of the general form. Thus a lusus naturae or monster in the class of quad- rupeds, for instance, or of birds, may have two heads, or eight legs; but the supernumerary parts will be always those of its own class, in- deed of its own species: and therefore it is ab- surd to suppose that if there be no mixture of species in the same class, there should ever be a confusion of two distinct kingdoms of nature. Horace, than whom no one better understood the principles of imaginative or artificial poetry, knew that abrupt combinations of heterogeneous subjects would certainly offend a correct taste, because unnatural: for taste, it may be affirmed, is, in one of its essential attributes, a feeling in harmony with natural combinations; whether the individual combination be that of sounds, or colours, or forms, or of intellectual images, or moral sentiments: and nature, which may be preeminently called the tI^vy] 7101^1^, though she may occasionally surprise the mind by unusual combinations of organs natural to the species, never so couples together heterogeneous organs, as that the limbs of animals of one species$