Page:Letters on the Human Body (John Clowes).djvu/79

Rh been made sensible, that your body cannot live without a constant regular supply of meats and drinks for its support and nourishment. Yet without the sense of taste, how would you be enabled to distinguish its several kinds of meats and drinks, so as to discern what is salutary and what is otherwise? How, I say, could you tell the difference between what is bitter and what is sweet; between pure wine and that which is adulterated; between fresh water and putrid; or, in general, between the food which is wholesome and nutritive, and that which has a tendency to injure and impair the constitution? The then, in supplying you with the sense of taste, has been pleased to appoint a guard at the door of your earthly tabernacle—the body, to watch what would gain admission there, by examining minutely whether it be a friend or a foe, and by receiving' or rejecting it accordingly,—since without this guard you would be exposed continually to the incursion of the most mischievous and deadly intruders.

The natural and temporal benefits, then, of the bodily sense of which I am speaking, are too manifest to be dwelt upon, and therefore it will be sufficient to leave them to your own reflection, to make a proper estimate of their number, as well as of their value: and this I shall do with the more willingness, that I may be the