Some four-fifths of the weight of the human body are nothing but
water. The blood is just a solution of the body in a vast excess of
water--as saliva, mucus, milk, gall, urine, sweat, and tears are the
local and partial infusions effected by that liquid. All the soft
solid parts of the frame may be considered as ever temporary
precipitates or crystallisations (to use the word but loosely) from
the blood, that mother-liquor of the whole body; always being
precipitated or suffered to become solid, and always being
redissolved, the forms remaining, but the matter never the same for
more than a moment, so that the flesh is only a vanishing solid, as
fluent as the blood itself. It has also to be observed, that every
part of the body, melting again into the river of life continually as
it does, is also kept perpetually drenched in blood by means of the
blood-vessels, and more than nine-tenths of that wonderful current is
pure water. Water plays as great a part, indeed, in the economy of
that little world, the body of man, as it still more evidently does in
the phenomenal life of the world at large. Three-fourths of the
surface of the earth is ocean; the dry ground is dotted with lakes,
its mountain-crests are covered with snow and ice, its surface is
irrigated by rivers and streams, its edges are eaten by the sea; and
aqueous vapour is unceasingly ascending from the ocean and inland
surfaces through the yielding air, only to descend in portions and at
intervals in dews and rains, hails and snows. Water is not only the
basis of the juices of all the plants and animals in the world; it is
the very blood of nature, as is well known to all the terrestrial
sciences; and old Thales, the earliest of European speculators,
pronounced it the mother-liquid of the universe. In the later systems
of the Greeks, indeed, it was reduced to the inferior dignity of being
only one of the four parental natures--fire, air, earth, and water;
but water was the highest--[Greek: udôr men ariston]--in
rank.--_Westminster Review_.