PRIESTLEY'S DISCOVERY OF OXYGEN GAS, 393 



beautiful commentary on the fictitious stories of antiquity are these 

 modern discoveries ! He calls to mind the metamorphoses that Ovid 

 describes ; the bore, perhaps, of his school-boy life, the elegant amuse- 

 ment of his later years. He remembers how Daphne was turned into 

 a laurel, and Adonis into a flower ; the musical stanzas are no longer 

 an empty sound, they are descriptive histories. The thing he has read 

 of is actually so. These transformations, instead of being imaginary 

 exceptions, are the common lot of life in this world. There grows 

 not now a leaf that is not formed from the parts of animals that are 

 dead ; there lives not a solitary animal being which has not derived 

 its constituent elements from plants. 



Here, then, we are led to a most remarkable conclusion. If the 

 air for thousands of years has remained unchanged, and if these 

 antagonizing processes are all the time going on, equalizing its con- 

 stitution, it necessarily follows that the amount of vegetable is accu- 

 rately adjusted to the amount of animal life ; the one cannot get the 

 better of the other, for, if it did, the excess would be instantly re- 

 strained by its antagonist, and, in this point of view, these two grand 

 forms of life constitute together a splendid automatic or self-adjusting 

 machine. Men talk about the dullness of science ; it is only so to 

 those who are unable to follow its developments to their consequences. 

 Where will you find in the whole range of poetry a conception more 

 sublime than this ? The two divisions of the world of organization 

 reacting on each other through the medium of the atmosphere — the 

 living against the lifeless, the moving against the motionless; and 

 not only thus influencing each other through that medium, but main- 

 taining its properties forever unimpaired, and ready for action. It is 

 the glory of astronomy to have proved that the planetary orbs, which 

 circle round the sun, under the influences of a pair of forces thus 

 reacting, can retain their movements undisturbed through a coming 

 eternity. And if astronomy has made the splendid discovery that the 

 inorganic world has attained a condition of eternal equilibrium, chem- 

 istry has rivaled it by showing that the same grand truth applies to 

 the world of organization. To watch the eternal coming out of the 

 transitory will always strike a reflecting mind with emotions of the 

 highest admiration. The sunbeam — the finger of God — that reaches 

 across the unknown abysses of the universe in a moment, bringing life 

 out of death, and clothing the objects around us with their many-col- 

 ored dyes, has extracted this condition of everlasting permanence 

 from a preexisting transient order of things. 



From considering this adjustment of the animal and vegetable 

 kingdoms to each other, we might be led to the idea that each indi- 

 vidual in these natural divisions has its counterpart in the other ; an 

 idea bringing us into a new relation with inanimate objects. There is 

 implanted deeply in the hearts of all men an instinctive love of natu- 

 ral scenery — forests, flowers, the green grass — and surely such a sen- 



