NATURAL PHILOSOPHY, 



THE UNIVERSAL METAMORPHOSIS. 



IF a wafer be laid on a surface of polished metal, which is then 

 breathed upon, and if, when the moisture of the breath has evapo- 

 rated, the wafer be shaken off, we shall find that the whole polished 

 surface is not as it was before, although our senses can detect no differ- 

 ence ; for if we breathe again upon it the surface will be moist every- 

 where except on the spot previously sheltered by the wafer, which will 

 now appear as a spectral image on the surface. Again and again we 

 breathe, and the moisture evaporates, but still the spectral wafer re- 

 appears. This experiment succeeds after a lapse of many months, if 

 the metal be carefully put aside where its surface cannot be disturbed. 

 If a sheet of paper on which a key has been laid be exposed for some 

 minutes to the sunshine, and then instantaneously viewed in the dark, 

 the key being removed, a fading spectre of the key will be visible, 

 Let this paper be put aside for many months where nothing can dis- 

 turb it, and then in darkness be laid on a plate of hot metal, the spec- 

 tre of the key will again appear. In the case of bodies more higlily 

 phosphorescent than paper, the spectres of many different objects which 

 may have been laid on it in succession will, on warming, emerge in 

 their proper order. This is equally true of our bodies and our minds. 

 We arc involved in the universal metamorphosis. Nothing leaves us 

 wholly as it found us. Every man we meet, every book we read, 

 every picture or landscape we see, every word or tone we hear, min- 

 gles with our being and modifies it. There are cases on record of 

 ignorant women, in states of insanity, uttering Greek and Hebrew 

 phrases, which in past years they have heard their masters utter, with- 

 out, of course, comprehending them. These tones had long been for- 

 gotten ; the traces were so faint that, under ordinary conditions, they 

 were invisible ; but these traces were there, and in the intense light of 

 cerebral excitement they started into prominence, just as the spectre 

 image of the key started into sight on the application of heat. It is 

 thus with all the influences to winch we are subjected. Cornhill Mag- 

 azine. 



CONSTITUTION OF MATTER. 



Some speculative ideas by M. Graham, the master of the mint, ap- 

 pear in a late number of the Philosophical Magazine. He says : "In 

 the condition of gas, matter is deprived of numerous and varying prop- 

 erties with which it appears invested when in the form of a liquid or 

 solid. The gas exhibits only a few grand and simple features. These, 

 again, may also be dependent upon atomic or molecular mobility. 

 Let us imagine one kind of substance only to exist, ponderable mat- 

 ter ; and, further, that matter is divisible into ultimate atoms, uniform 



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