——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 of 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.