which either the fingers or the bow of a master of music perform on
a musical instrument: for sometimes it strikes the teeth, sometimes
the roof of the mouth. There is a pipe that goes into the inside of
the neck, called throat, from the roof of the mouth to the breast,
which is made up of cartilaginous rings nicely set one within
another, and lined within with a very smooth membrane, in order to
render the air that is pushed from the lungs more sonorous. On the
side of the roof of the mouth the end of that pipe is opened like a
flute, by a slit, that either extends, or contracts itself as is
necessary to render the voice either big or slender, hollow or
clear. But lest the aliments, which have their separate pipe,
should slide into the windpipe I have been describing, there is a
kind of valve that lies on the orifice of the organ of the voice,
and playing like a drawbridge, lets the aliments freely pass through
their proper channel, but never suffers the least particle or drop
to fall into the slit of the windpipe. This sort of valve has a
very free motion, and easily turns any way, so that by shaking on
that half-opened orifice, it performs the softest modulations of the
voice. This instance is sufficient to show, by-the-by, and without
entering long-winded details of anatomy, what a marvellous art there
is in the frame of the inward parts. And indeed the organ I have
described is the most perfect of all musical instruments, nor have
these any perfection, but so far as they imitate that.


SECT. XLI. Of the Smell, Taste, and Hearing.


Who were able to explain the niceness of the organs by which man
discerns the numberless savours and odours of bodies? But how is it