the intestines, gastric and intestinal derangements, foulness of the tongue from those of the mucous membranes, overflowings of bile from that of the liver, &c. Thus in a machine in which the whole is united and connected together, if one part is deranged all the others are so also. We should laugh at the mechanist who attempted to mend but one of these pieces, and neglected to repair the local derangement from which all those arose which the machine exhibits. Let us not laugh at the physician who attacks only a single symptom, without combating the disease, of which he oftentimes knows not the principle, though he knows that this principle exists; but let us laugh at him, if he attaches to his treatment an importance which is nothing compared with that of the disease. The intestines next to the stomach are the most often sympathetically affected in diseases. The bladder is the organic muscle that is the last to feel the influences that go from the diseased organ; this sometimes however happens. In fevers, we know that retentions of urine from sympathetic and temporary paralysis, are not very rare; incontinence of urine is less often seen. _Character of the Vital Properties._ We see from what has been said, that the vital properties are very active in the organic muscles, especially as it respects contractility. These muscles are really during life, in constant action: they receive with great ease the influence of other organs. Their vital properties are altered with the greatest promptness, especially that which I have just pointed out; for the insensible contractility is rarely altered in them, because it does not perform an essential part. Observe in fact that the morbid derangements of an organ affect always the predominant vital force of that organ. Animal contractility is frequently altered in the preceding system; in this it is the sensible organic contractility. On the contrary, the insensible being very small, the phenomena over which it presides remain always nearly the same; nutrition is always uniform; lesions of the muscular texture are rare; when they take place, it is rather by communication, as in cancers of the stomach, in which the disease begins upon the mucous surface, and in which the fleshy fibres are only consequently affected. The heart and the womb are the muscles that are the most subject to these morbid alterations; yet in the first they belong oftener to the internal membrane than to the fleshy fibres themselves. On the contrary in the systems in which the sensible organic contractility is incessantly in action, as in the cutaneous, the serous, &c. in which it presides over nutrition and exhalation; in the glandular, the mucous, &c. in which it produces secretion and nutrition, it is this which is especially altered. From these derangements arise alterations of texture, organic diseases properly called, which are as common in these systems, as they