66 THE REV. J. G. WOOD. 



eternal, and universal. The form is constantly liable to mutation, 

 but the substance always remains. 



In every pebble that lies unheeded on the ground are pent sundry 

 gasebus substances, which only await the delivering hand of the 

 analyser to be liberated and expanded ; possessing in their free and 

 etherealised existence many powers and properties which they were 

 debarred from exercising while imprisoned in their condensed and 

 materialised form. To the ordinary observer, the stone thus trans- 

 muted in its form appears to be destroyed, but its apparent death is in 

 reality the beginning of a new life, with extended powers and more 

 ethereal substance. Thus it is that physical death acts upon man- 

 kind, and in that light it is regarded by the true and brave spirit, 

 with whom to live is toil, and death is a new birth into life, of which 

 he is conscious even here. Death is to such minds the greatest 

 boon that could be conferred upon them, for just as the destruction 

 of the pebble etherealises and expands the element of its being, 

 so by the deatK or destruction of the body the spirit is liberated 

 from its material prison, and humanity is divinised through death. 



And also the following, which I select because it 

 embodies my father's great principle, that scientific 

 phraseology is in place only in strictly scientific works 

 written expressly for strictly scientific readers, and 

 that in books written for the general public it may 

 and must be dispensed with. 



The observer can, in a minute fragment of bone, though hardly 

 larger than a midge's wing, read the class of animal of whose frame- 

 work it once formed a part as decisively as if its former owner were 

 present to claim his property ; for each particle of every animal is 

 imbued with Ihe nature of the whole being. The life-character is 

 enshrined in and written upon every sanguine disc that rolls through 

 the veins ; is manifested in every fibre and nerveletthat gives energy 

 and force to the breathing and active body ; and is stereotyped upon 

 each bony atom that forms part of its skeleton framework. 



Whoever reads these hieroglyphs rightly is truly a poet and a 



