OF NATURAL PHILOSOPHY. 65 



abundant acids ? * that dry bones could be a maga- 

 zine of nutriment, capable of preservation for years, 

 and ready to yield up their sustenance in the form 

 best adapted to the support of life, on the application 

 of that powerful agent, steam, which enters so largely 

 into all our processes, or of an acid at once cheap 

 and durable ?t that sawdust itself is susceptible 

 of conversion into a substance bearing no remote 

 analogy to bread ; and though certainly less palat- 

 able than that of flour, yet no way disagreeable, 

 and both wholesome and digestible as well as highly 

 nutritive ? J What economy, in all processes where 

 chemical agents are employed, is introduced by the 

 exact knowledge of the proportions in which natural 

 elements unite, and their mutual powers of displac- 

 ing each other ! What perfection in all the arts 

 where fire is employed, either in its more violent 

 applications, (as, for instance, in the smelting of 

 metals by the introduction of well adapted fluxes, 

 whereby we obtain the whole produce of the ore in 

 its purest state,) or in its milder forms, as in sugar- 

 refining (the whole modern practice of which de- 

 pends on a curious and delicate remark of a late 

 eminent scientific chemist on the nice adjustment of 

 temperature at which the crystallization of syrup 

 takes place); and a thousand other arts which it 

 would be tedious to enumerate ! 



* The sulphuric. Bracconot, Annales de Chimie, vol. xii. 

 p. 184. 



t D'Arcet, Annales de 1'Industrie, Fevrier, 18'29. 



f See Dr. Prout's account of the experiments of professor 

 Autenrieth of Tubingen. Phil. Trans. 1 827, p. 381 . This dis- 

 covery, which renders famine next to impossiUe, deserves a 

 higher degree of celebrity than it has obtained. 

 F 



