penny matter,--away they go cluttering like hey-go mad; and by treading the
same steps over and over again, they presently make a road of it, as plain
and as smooth as a garden-walk, which, when they are once used to, the
Devil himself sometimes shall not be able to drive them off it.

Pray my Dear, quoth my mother, have you not forgot to wind up the clock?--
Good G..! cried my father, making an exclamation, but taking care to
moderate his voice at the same time,--Did ever woman, since the creation of
the world, interrupt a man with such a silly question? Pray, what was your
father saying?--Nothing.



Chapter 1.II.

--Then, positively, there is nothing in the question that I can see, either
good or bad.--Then, let me tell you, Sir, it was a very unseasonable
question at least,--because it scattered and dispersed the animal spirits,
whose business it was to have escorted and gone hand in hand with the
Homunculus, and conducted him safe to the place destined for his reception.

The Homunculus, Sir, in however low and ludicrous a light he may appear, in
this age of levity, to the eye of folly or prejudice;--to the eye of reason
in scientific research, he stands confess'd--a Being guarded and
circumscribed with rights.--The minutest philosophers, who by the bye, have
the most enlarged understandings, (their souls being inversely as their
enquiries) shew us incontestably, that the Homunculus is created by the
same hand,--engender'd in the same course of nature,--endow'd with the same
loco-motive powers and faculties with us:--That he consists as we do, of
skin, hair, fat, flesh, veins, arteries, ligaments, nerves, cartilages,