Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Seeing is very different; it shows us objects that are near, or very distant, and it acts very rapidly; it gives us notions of things as wholes at first, and afterward studies their parts. The special nerves of sight are called the optic nerves. But sight can not act when light is absent, nor when the rays are obstructed by opaque objects. Hearing.—The medium through which we hear must always be present where life is possible, for it is the air we breathe; nor do intervening objects wholly prevent our hearing. No other sense affects the emotions so quickly or so deeply as hearing; this is seen in the effects of music, or of the tones of the voice. The auditory nerve is the special nerve of hearing. The senses we have considered make us acquainted with the size, shape, position, resonance, etc., of bodies; in other words, with such qualities of bodies as have relation to space. Tasting And Smelling.—But tasting and smelling, by means of the gustatory and olfactory nerves, enable us to learn much of the composition and condition of bodies. We judge by these senses whether substances are fit to be taken into our organism or not. Hence, the special nerves for these senses are found in the mouth and nose, the gateways to the stomach and lungs. Sense Of Resistance.—When you allow an object merely to touch your hand, you simply feel it; but when you let it rest upon your hand, and Pcd.—2. put forth muscular effort to sustain it, your sense seems to give you something besides simple feeling; you have a sense of something resisting your muscular effort. This is why philosphers say that there is a sixth sense; and they say that no other sense makes us know so soon and so certainly that there are objects outside of our own organism. Teachers can teach young children a gr...