Excerpt from John Leech, Artist and Humourist: A Biographical SketchThe late Dr. John brown, at the commencement of his admirable paper on john leech, discourses humorously on the physiology and philosophy of laughter, and on the various ways in which it seizes upon and deals with mankind: how it excruciates some, causing them to look and yell as if caught in a trap, how others, whom laughter grips and rends, are made desperate, and commit havoc with the furniture. He then treats of the uses of laughter as a muscular exercise, Of its drawing into action lazy muscles, supernumeraries, which get Off easily under ordinary circumstances, how much good the con vulsive succussion of the whole man does to his chylo-poietic and other viscera how it laughs to scorn care and malaise of all kinds, how it makes you cry without sorrow, and ache every inch of you without wrong done to any one, how it clears the liver and enlivens the spleen, and makes the very cockles of the heart to tingle.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.