 his duty very well
without it.
    If death, said my father, reasoning with himself, is nothing but the
separation of the soul from the body; - and if it is true that people can walk
about and do their business without brains, - then certes the soul does not
inhabit there. Q.E.D.
    As for that certain very thin, subtle and very fragrant juice which
Coglionissimo Borri, the great Milaneze physician, affirms, in a letter to
Bartholine, to have discovered in the cellulæ of the occipital parts of the
cerebellum, and which he likewise affirms to be the principal seat of the
reasonable soul (for, you must know, in these latter and more enlightened ages,
there are two souls in every man living, - the one, according to the great
Metheglingius, being called the Animus, the other the Anima); - as for this
opinion, I say, of Borri, - my father could never subscribe to it by any means;
the very idea of so noble, so refined, so immaterial, and so exalted a being as
the Anima, or even the Animus, taking up her residence, and sitting dabbling,
like a tad-pole, all day long, both summer and winter, in a puddle, - or in a
liquid of any kind, how thick or thin soever, he would say, shock'd his
imagination; he would scarce give the doctrine a hearing.
    What, therefore, seem'd the least liable to objections of any, was, that the
chief sensorium, or head-quarters of the soul, and to which place all
intelligences were referred, and from whence all her mandates were issued, - was
in, or near, the cerebellum, - or rather some-where about the medulla oblongata,
wherein it was generally agreed by Dutch anatomists, that all the minute nerves
from all the organs of the seven senses concentered, like streets and winding
alleys, into a square.
    So far there was nothing singular in my father's opinion, - he had the best
of philosophers, of all ages and climates, to go along with him. - But here he
took a road of his own, setting up another Shandean hypothesis upon these
corner-stones they had laid for him; - and which said hypothesis equally stood
its ground; whether the subtilty and fineness of the soul depended upon the
temperature and clearness of the said liquor, or of the finer net-work and
texture in the cerebellum itself; which opinion he favoured.
    He maintained, that next to the due care to
