6 THE ORIGIN OF CREATION. 



instance, when a soda powder is mixed, great effervescence is the 

 result shewn ; while in mixing sulphuric acid in water, great heat 

 is the result for a few minutes, without any visible motion. 

 Why the one should have great motion, without heat, and the 

 other great heat without apparent motion, are problems that we 

 can only solve by saying, that all individual atoms and classes of 

 atoms, have properties of their own, which they have possessed 

 from the beginning , which are inseparable from them, and which 

 cannot be annihilated. Why certain atoms are only effervescing, 

 and others only heating, we would suggest as a capital and safe 

 amusement, for those speculative philosophers, who are continu- 

 ally indulging ill those harmless and incontrovertible calculations 

 anent the end of the world ; as to whether it will be caused by 

 a comet, or a tidal wave, or a collision with Hercules, or by the 

 extinction of the sun, or by the destruction of vegetation by 

 insects, or by the spontaneous combustion and explosion of the 

 earth from its internal fires. For on the acceptation of our 

 system of matter and force, and its evident connection with all 

 the phenomena of the heavens and the earth, their occupation 

 in that direction will be entirely gone. 



Let us now take a simple experiment of chemical action by 

 the atmosphere. Allow a glass of Water to stand on a table a 

 whole day, and when any one attempts to drink it, he will 

 immediately say it is not fresh. A change, therefore, must have 

 taken place in the water. What was the nature of it ? Simply 

 that the atmosphere being composed of the same materials ae 

 the water (only in different proportions) the atoms in one, at- 

 tracted the atoms in the other, and reciprocated, so that the 

 water lost some of its own particular atoms, and became pos- 

 sessed of the composite particles of the atmosphere. Thus it is 



