VOLATILIZATION OF MATTER. 



mysterious processes of world-formation, will, eventually, 

 become stars, and reflect across the blue immensity of 

 heaven, in brightness, that light which is the necessary 

 agent of organisation and all manifestations of beauty ? 

 The inferences drawn from a careful study of the con- 

 dition of our own globe are in favour of the assumption 

 of the existence of nebulous matter. By the processes 

 of art and manufacture, by the operation of those powers 

 on which organisation and life depend, solid matter is 

 constantly poured, off in such a state that it cannot be 

 detected, as matter, by any of the human senses. Yet 

 a thousand results, daily and hourly accumulating as 

 truths around us, prove that the solid metals, the gross 

 earths, and the constituents of animal and vegetable life, 

 all pass away invisible to us, and become " thin air/* 

 We know that, floating around us, these volatilized 

 bodies exist in some material form, and numerous ex- 

 periments in chemistry are calculated to convince us, 

 that the most attenuated air is capable, with a slight 

 change of circumstances, of being converted into the 

 condition of solid masses. Hydrogen gas, the lightest, 

 the most ethereal of the chemical elements, dissolves iron 

 and zinc, arsenic, sulphur, and carbon; and from the 

 transparent combinations thus formed, we can with 

 facility separate those ponderous bodies. Such sub- 

 stances must exist in our own atmosphere; why not 

 in the regions of space? Whether this planet ever 

 floated a mass of nebulous matter, only known by its 

 dim and filmy light, or comet-like rushed through 

 space with widely eccentric orbit, are questions which 

 can only receive the reply of speculative minds. 

 Whether the earth and the other members of the Solar 

 System were ever parts of a Central Sun,* and thrown 



* In the Astronomiscle Nachrichten of July, 1840, appeared a- 

 Memoir by M. M tidier, Die Centralsonne. The conclusions arrived 

 at by Miidler may be understood from the following quotation from 

 a French translation, made by M. A. Gautier, in the Archives dea 



