He that believeth not is damned," was the constantly reiterated admonition to those who were passing through the ceremony of initiation, in the Temple, by the Priests of Egypt.

The ceremony was commenced by eating the panis oblationem, so that the candidate could be easily subjugated to the will of the operators who conducted the ceremony of the mysteries. It was on these occasions that empirical knowledge was resorted to with so much effect. Most of the phenomena of the brain were unquestionably known in those ages, which, from the absence of scientific principles, were ascribed to supernatural sources.

All the phenomena of the nervous system, no matter how apparently ethereal or spiritual, are materially connected with elements which govern the animal economy; and, if not now, will at no distant period be perfectly understood and susceptible of a physiological explanation. From the earliest days of our existence we are merely the reflex of those with whom accident has thrown us in contact. Do not the impressions of the nursery haunt us through life - and they too often become our masters in the weak and unguarded moments incidental to misfortune, disease, decrepitude, or at approaching dissolution?

Man has always been the creature of those by whom he was first instructed. If his parents or guardians were Japanese, Hindoos, Turks, Africans, French, English, or American, he certainly was not consulted on these points: nor had he a choice as to his educational prejudices thereby induced.

It is alone in the advancement of scientific truth that true progress is to be sought. Science may be compared to the young Hercules struggling with the monster typhons - Ignorance and Superstition. When the child shall have attained maturity, these demons will have been exterminated. Ages may yet pass before the consummation of that state; then men will have ceased to butcher each other for some abstract idea, the merits of which are not even understood by the combatants, but merely to gratify the selfish vanity of some ambitious potentate. The time will arrive when men will not be thus sacrificed; but before that can take place, education must have made great strides.

Science, in its onward march, exposes the tricks, the frauds, devices, and artful mummeries of the priests, the magicians, and soothsayers of Babylon, Chaldaea, China, Syria, and Egypt, whose craft has so impressed the whole habitable world at this moment. Did not the leaders of the Israelites receive all their instruction from the Egyptians? Certainly the writings attributed to Moses were inspired by his education during his forty years in Egypt, from the period of his mysterious finding by Pharaoh's daughter, to the time he left the temple as one of the initiated in magic and medicine.

What is the condition of the brain at birth? Is it a "tabula rasa," or is the nervous matter predisposed to hereditary conditions as inherent consequences of parentage, which develop themselves in defiance of any system of education?

No one can imagine that there are innate ideas under all circumstances; in the higher animal scale, the conditions for the manifestation of the faculty or function of a specific organ must exist. It is true that in certain cases we discover a physical attraction or repulsion before the animal has had time to receive education: as much an affinity, which cannot be resisted, as is exhibited when inorganic bodies are brought together under favourable circumstances.

The brain of man becomes modified in the exercise of the faculties by systematic education. The senses are the inlets or channels of all the knowledge the brain has obtained.

The senses hold direct communication physically with the laws and conditions of all matter; the eye is an optical instrument, and the ear an acoustic, in accordance with the laws of light and sound. It follows that as these organs receive and convey impressions according to physical laws, that the sensorium, the brain matter, must also have a condition or organization adapted to receive these impressions, and also to retain them.

Are not the images received by the eye painted on the retina, which is an expansion of the optic nerve? This simple fact requires no argument to prove its necessity; in fine, the images received produce on the sensorium their corresponding impressions, and there is a definite form of vibration of the nervous particles or molecules that compose the cerebral matter. If there were to be a suspension of cerebral vibration, there would also be a corresponding suspension of the thinking and voluntary power. No one who has observed the vital functions of the lower orders of life, perfect from their earliest moment of existence, but must have been convinced that the sensitive condition bears no comparison to that which exists in man; moments in these may be equal to years. The example of the sight of the eagle in relation to that possessed by man is sufficiently great; but nothing to the extreme sensitiveness with which their functions of life are called in requisition. These have been, for want of a better name, called "instincts," which is nothing more than the attractive or repulsive states peculiar to the special creation.

One of the most illustrative cases is that of the hatching of duck's eggs by the fowl. The moment the young birds emerge from the shell they make for the water; the foster-mother cannot follow. Here is an attraction and a repulsion. It is evident then that had there not existed an inherent attraction for the water, the ducks would not have entered it; and if there had not been a repulsion, the fowl would have gone to the rescue at the supposed danger of her adopted brood. This same affinity is manifested in a thousand different phases in animal life.

The nervous ganglions are extremely sensitive: in many insects so great, that their defined functions are brought into play coeval with their coming into existence. The laws of life must be studied from the physical stand-point; the physiologist is the vital chemist, whose office it is to analyse these varied phenomena. The vital element exists as much as the atmosphere we breathe. The earth itself had to pass through a state of existence which developed this very element, the vestiges of which are now found as the constituent composition of the upper strata, which covers our globe for hundreds of feet. Even at this period of the earth's existence, do we not find that the very conditions of the zones at specific periods are essential to certain forms, of animal existence?

There was a period in the early transformations of the earth which rendered it no more difficult to conceive the creation of the largest forms of life (as the mammoth), than now would be the production of animalculae. The same causes invariably produce the like effects.