THE POETRY OF CHEMISTRY. 91 



maltster takes advantage of this, to produce that delicate flavour in 

 the barley, which, when combined with the intoxicating product of a 

 second change in the sugar itself, has proved the source of physical 

 suffering and social misery to millions. 



If the imaginings of the early world were brilliant and startling, the 

 facts of modern chemists are imbued with a poetry more lofty still, 

 while they have for their basis the solid ground of truth, and stand 

 separated by a wide gulf from the phantasies of fiction. What oriental 

 fiction of aeriel temples, or rainbow daughters of the sky, can for a 

 moment be compared with the simple chemistry of the atmosphere, 

 or the rainbows themselves ? This soft, universal, azure medium in 

 which the round world swings, and which holds the clouds in its arms, 

 letting them fall drop by drop in fatness to the earth, or that spanning 

 archway of the angels, formed by millions of separate particles of rain, 

 each particle a prism, which cuts up the rays of light into separate 

 parts, and explains their anatomy and their colours ? What fable of 

 old can stand side by side with the fact that — 



Each drop of water is a world, containing 

 Creatures more numerous than the men of earth, 



The April shower upon the green tree raining, 

 To fresh creations in each leaf gives birth : 



Nature, her balance everywhere regaining, 

 New breathing things to form, leaves nothing dearth, — 



Spitzbergen's ice and Afric's sandy field 



To Nature's living mass their tribute yield ? 



No ! there is more wonder in truth than fable, and more poetry in 

 fact than fiction. 



But there are revelations of this wonder-world of change more 

 startling than these, and perhaps more truly poetic. The most obdu- 

 rate and inflexible bodies seem destined by a law of their nature to 

 work their viray up through successive orders of being, till they reach 

 the highest of them all ; and when there, to fill a purpose essential to 

 the very existence of man himself. Thus, without phosphorus, and 

 sulphur, and potash, and lime, the human frame would be destitute of 

 outline and power of locomotion, for with these materials its bones 



resist the destroying influences to which seeds are subject ; but which the young 

 plant is unable to absorb into its tissues ; hence the necessity, during germi- 

 nation, for its conversion into sugar. 



