nguification--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.

The logicians stuck much closer to the point before them than any of the
classes of the literati;--they began and ended with the word Nose; and
had it not been for a petitio principii, which one of the ablest of
them ran his head against in the beginning of the combat, the whole
controversy had been settled at once.

A nose, argued the logician, cannot bleed without blood--and not only
blood--but blood circulating in it to supply the phaenomenon with a
succession of drops--(a stream being but a quicker succession of drops,
that is included, said he.)--Now death, continued the logician, being
nothing but the stagnation of the blood--

I deny the definition--Death is the separation of the soul from the
body, said his antagonist--Then we don't agree about our weapons,
said the logician--Then there is an end of th