You can hardly believe that there was time for all this sending of messages; for as soon as you felt the hot stove, you pulled your finger away. But you really could not have pulled it away, unless the brain had sent word to the muscles to do it.
Now, you know what we mean when we say, "As quick as thought." Surely nothing could be quicker.
You see that the brain has a great deal of work to do, for it has to send so many orders.
There are some muscles which are moving quietly and steadily all the time, though we take no notice of the motion.
You do not have to think about breathing, and yet the muscles work all the time, moving your chest.
If we had to think about it every time we breathed, we should have no time to think of any thing else.
There is one part of the brain that takes care of such work for us. It sends the messages about breathing, and keeps the breathing muscles and many other muscles faithfully at work. It does all this without our needing to know or think about it at all.
Do you begin to see that your body is a busy work-shop, where many kinds of work are being done all day and all night?
Although we lie still and sleep in the night, the breathing must go on, and so must the work of those other organs that never stop until we die.