Water Music - Part II

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

Impression, Soleil Levant Oil Claude Monet

“A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.”
- Henry David Thoreau

Scientific American magazine ran a fascinating article about hiccups, and why we get them. It turns out that we have a nerve pathway in our neck that is common in creatures who have gills, not lungs, and so may be a vestigial remnant of our former lives as ocean-dwellers. The second piece of evidence connecting us to our ancient aquatic selves is that gill-breathers regularly hiccup as part of the oxygen-exchange process, a skill from which we have not yet completely evolved. The author is saying that everyone is still just a little fishy, and so we sometimes get the hiccups. Our bodies themselves consist of up to 60% water, and our brains are literally water-logged, at 70% w…