My dear friends, one and all, I can do nothing but report such remarks as I happen to have made at our breakfast-table. Their character will depend on many accidents,--a good deal on the particular persons in the company to whom they were addressed. It so happens that those which follow were mainly intended for the divinity-student and the school-mistress; though others, whom I need not mention, saw fit to interfere, with more or less propriety, in the conversation. This is one of my privileges as a talker; and of course, if I was not talking for our whole company, I don't expect all the readers of this periodical to be interested in my notes of what was said. Still, I think there may be a few that will rather like this vein,--possibly prefer it to a livelier one,--serious young men, and young women generally, in life's roseate parenthesis from ---- years of age to ---- inclusive. Another privilege of talking is to misquote.--Of course it wasn't Proserpina that actually cut the yellow hair,--but _Iris_. It was the former lady's regular business, but Dido had used herself ungenteelly, and Madame d'Enfer stood firm on the point of etiquette. So the bathycolpian Here--Juno, in Latin--sent down Iris instead. But I was mightily pleased to see that one of the gentlemen that do the heavy articles for this magazine misquoted Campbell's line without any excuse. "Waft us _home_ the _message_" of course it ought to be. Will he be duly grateful for the correction?] ----The more we study the body and the mind, the more we find both to be governed, not _by_, but _according to_ laws, such as we observe in the larger universe.--You think you know all about _walking_,--don't you, now? Well, how do you suppose your lower limbs are held to your body? They are sucked up by two cupping vessels, ("cotyloid"--cup-like-cavities,) and held there as long as you live, and longer. At any rate, you think you move them backward and forward at such a rate as your will determines, don't you? On the contrary, they swing just as any other pendulums swing, at a fixed rate, determined by their length. You can alter this by muscular power, as you can take hold of the pendulum of a clock and make it move faster or slower; but your ordinary gait is timed by the same mechanism as the movements of the solar system. [My friend, the Professor, told me all this, referring me to certain German physiologists by the name of Weber for proof of the facts, which, however, he said he had often verified. I appropriated it to my own use; what can one do better than this, when one has a friend that tells him anything worth remembering? The Professor seems to think that man and the general powers of the universe are in partnership. Some one was saying that it had cost nearly half a million to move the Leviathan only so far as they had got it already.--Why,--said the Professor,--they might have hired an EARTHQUAKE for less money!]