'Tis worth remarking, for the benefit of all demonstrators in natural philosophy, &c. that as soon as the trumpeter's wife had finished the abbess of Quedlingberg's private lecture, and had begun to read in public, which she did upon a stool in the middle of the great parade,--she incommoded the other demonstrators mainly, by gaining incontinently the most fashionable part of the city of Strasburg for her auditory--But when a demonstrator in philosophy (cries Slawkenbergius) has a trumpet for an apparatus, pray what rival in science can pretend to be heard besides him?
Whilst the unlearned, thro' these conduits of intelligence, were all busied in getting down to the bottom of the well, where Truth keeps her little court--were the learned in their way as busy in pumping her up thro' the conduits of dialect induction--they concerned themselves not with facts--they reasoned--
Not one profession had thrown more light upon this subject than the Faculty--had not all their disputes about it run into the affair of Wens and oedematous swellings, they could not keep clear of them for their bloods and souls--the stranger's nose had nothing to do either with wens or oedematous swellings.
It was demonstrated however very satisfactorily, that such a ponderous mass of heterogenous matter could not be congested and conglomerated to the nose, whilst the infant was in Utera, without destroying the statical balance of the foetus, and throwing it plump upon its head nine months before the time.----The opponents granted the theory--they denied the consequences.
And if a suitable provision of veins, arteries, &c. said they, was not laid in, for the due nourishment of such a nose, in the very first stamina and rudiments of its formation, before it came into the world (bating the case of Wens) it could not regularly grow and be sustained afterwards.
This was all answered by a dissertation upon nutriment, and the effect which nutriment had in extending the vessels, and in the increase and prolongation of the muscular parts to the greatest growth and expansion imaginable--In the triumph of which theory, they went so far as to affirm, that there was no cause in nature, why a nose might not grow to the size of the man himself.
The respondents satisfied the world this event could never happen to them so long as a man had but one stomach and one pair of lungs--For the stomach, said they, being the only organ destined for the reception of food, and turning it into chyle--and the lungs the only engine of sanguification--it could possibly work off no more, than what the appetite brought it: or admitting the possibility of a man's overloading his stomach, nature had set bounds however to his lungs--the engine was of a determined size and strength, and could elaborate but a certain quantity in a given time--that is, it could produce just as much blood as was sufficient for one single man, and no more; so that, if there was as much nose as man--they proved a mortification must necessarily ensue; and forasmuch as there could not be a support for both, that the nose must either fall off from the man, or the man inevitably fall off from his nose.
Nature accommodates herself to these emergencies, cried the opponents--else what do you say to the case of a whole stomach--a whole pair of lungs, and but half a man, when both his legs have been unfortunately shot off?
He dies of a plethora, said they--or must spit blood, and in a fortnight or three weeks go off in a consumption.----It happens otherwise--replied the opponents.--It ought not, said they.
The more curious and intimate inquirers after nature and her doings, though they went hand in hand a good way together, yet they all divided about the nose at last, almost as much as the Faculty itself They amicably laid it down, that there was a just and geometrical arrangement and proportion of the several parts of the human frame to its several destinations, offices, and functions, which could not be transgressed but within certain limits--that nature, though she sported--she sported within a certain circle;--and they could not agree about the diameter of it.
The logicians stuck much closer to the point before them than any of the classes of the literati;--they began and ended with the word Nose; and had it not been for a petitio principii, which one of the ablest of them ran his head against in the beginning of the combat, the whole controversy had been settled at once.
A nose, argued the logician, cannot bleed without blood--and not only blood--but blood circulating in it to supply the phaenomenon with a succession of drops--(a stream being but a quicker succession of drops, that is included, said he.)--Now death, continued the logician, being nothing but the stagnation of the blood--I deny the definition--Death is the separation of the soul from the body, said his antagonist--Then we don't agree about our weapons, said the logician--Then there is an end of the dispute, replied the antagonist.
The civilians were still more concise: what they offered being more in the nature of a decree--than a dispute.
Such a monstrous nose, said they, had it been a true nose, could not possibly have been suffered in civil society--and if false--to impose upon society with such false signs and tokens, was a still greater violation of its rights, and must have had still less mercy shewn it.
The only objection to this was, that if it proved any thing, it proved the stranger's nose was neither true nor false.