1866. | Synthetical Chemistry. 35 
works, is to exhibit the greatest want of faith, not alone in man’s 
powers and destiny, but in the might and goodwill of his Maker: 
it means, in fact, to abdicate man’s noblest powers, neglect his 
highest faculties, return to the darker stages of his existence,—for 
where there is no progress there must be retrogression,—and to make 
him the image of God in name alone and not in nature. The 
story of Prometheus is, in common with many others of a similar 
character, merely a childlike fancy of man in the earliest stage of 
his history, which is every day approaching realization in another 
form, just as the efforts of the old philosophers and alchemists were 
the result of dreams which have become in our day living realities. 
The creative powers of man have to be educated, just as all his 
other faculties; and this, the highest portion of his nature, has 
been more gradually yet more systematically developed than any 
other. The principle upon which his mind has been trained may 
be exhibited by a very simple illustration. 
There are few of our readers who have not seen those interesting 
little puzzles shaped like a double cross. When the curiously- 
formed pieces of wood which constitute this cross are placed in our 
hands for the first time and we are invited to construct the object, 
we often spend hours in the vain attempt to do so; but let the 
pieces once be put together by hands that are in the secret, and the 
cross presented to us entire, and give us then the opportunity of 
carefully and obseryantly removing piece by piece until the whole 
is completely dissected, and we shall find but little difficulty in 
reconstructing what we had before laboured in vain to build up. 
The simile, it must be admitted, is imperfect ; but true it is that 
before we can synthetize we must understand well how to analyze ; 
and it is not improbable that when all that the searching mind of 
man can accomplish in the unravelling of material complications 
has been effected, and when he sees with tolerable intelligence all 
the processes of nature in the dissolution of her living forms, and is 
able with the aided or unaided eye to follow her formative processes ; 
when he has been able to accomplish all these things, then it is not 
improbable that he may become skilled enough to construct the 
organized tissue in which vital force (let physicists call it what they 
will) finds a medium of action, just as he is now capable of preparing 
those mechanical contrivances which are rendered self-moving by 
the obedient forces of the physical world. One important step has 
been already made in this direction, for if he cannot yet form that 
plastic material, that protoplasm, in which life is first seen to dawn, 
at least he has robbed nature of her exclusive privilege to create 
substances which it has hitherto needed vital influences to produce. 
If he cannot usurp her powers so far as to make organized tissues, 
at least he has succeeded in constructing synthetically some of the 
proximate principles of which they are constituted, and it . to the 
D 
