Summary on dessection Beau's head
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Ijo was yesterday engaged in an assembly of virtuosos,1 where
one of them produced many curious observations which he had
lately made in the anatomy of an human body. Another of the
company communicated to us several wonderful discoveries
which he had also made on the same subject by the help of very
fine glasses.2
This gave birth to a great variety of uncommon
remarks, and furnished discourse for the remaining part of the
day.
The different opinions which were started on this occasion,
presented to my imagination so many new ideas, that, by mixing
with those which were already there, they employed my fancy all
the last night, and composed a very wild extravagant dream.
I was invited methought to the dissection of a beau’s3
head
and of a coquette’s heart, which were both of them laid on a table
before us. An imaginary operator opened the first with a great
deal of nicety, which, upon a cursory and superficial view,
appeared like the head of another man; but upon applying our
glasses to it, we made a very odd discovery, namely, that what
we looked upon as brains, were not such in reality, but an heap of
strange materials wound up in that shape and texture, and packed
together with wonderful art in the several cavities of the skull.
For, as Homer tells us that the gods is not real blood, but only
something like it, so we found that the brain of a beau is not a
real brain, but only something like it.
The pineal4
gland, which many of our modern philosophers
suppose to be the seat of the soul, smelt very strong of essence
and orange-flower water, and was encompassed with a kind of
horny substance, cut into a thousand little faces or mirrors which
were imperceptible to the naked eye, insomuch the the soul, if
there had been any here must have been always taken up in
contemplating her own beauties.
We observed a large antrum or cavity in the sinciput5
, that
was filled with ribands, lace and embroidery, wrought together in
a most curious piece of net-work, the parts of which were
likewise imperceptible to the naked eye. Another of these
antrums of cavities was stuffed with invisible billetdoux, love
letters, pricked dancers, and other trumpery of the same nature.
In another we found a kind of powder6
, which set the whole
company a sneezing, and by the scent discovered itself to be right
Spanish. The several other cells were stored with commodities of
the same kind, of which it would be tedious to give the reader an
exact inventory.
There was a large cavity on each side the head, which I must
not omit. That on the right side was filled with fictions, flatteries,
and falsehoods, vows, promised, and protestations; that on the
left, with oath and imprecations. There issued out a duct from
each of these cells, which ran into the root of the tongue, where
both joined together, and passed forward in one common duct to
the tip of it. We discovered several little roads or canals running
from the ear into the brain, and took particular care to trace them
out through their several passages. One of them extended itself
to a bundle of sonnets and little musical instruments. Others
ended in several bladders which were filled either with wind or
froth. But the large canal entered in to a great cavity of the skull,
from whence there went another canal into the tongue. This great
cavity was filled with a kind of spongy substance, which the
French anatomists call galimatias, and the English, nonsense.
The skins of the forehead were extremely tough and thick, and
what very much surprised us, had not in them any single bloodvessel that we were able to discover, either with or without our
glasses; from whence we concluded, that the deprived of the faculty of blushing.
The os cribriforme7
was exceedingly stuffed, and in some
places damaged with snuff. We could not but take notice in
particular of that small muscle which is not often discovered in
dissections, and draws the nose upwards, when it expresses the
contempt which the owner of it has, upon seeing anything he
does not like, or hearing anything he does not understand. I need
not tell my learned reader, this is that muscle which performs the
motion so often mentioned by the Latin poets, when they talk of a
man’s cocking his nose, or playing the rhinoceros.