THE WEALTH OF THE AIR. 93 



the infant to whom all animals are a repetition of the fireside cat ; 

 or like a dreamer playing with the words animal kingdom, vegetable 

 kingdom, atmosphere, and so forth ; and forgetting that each com- 

 prises many genera, innumerable species, and individuals many 

 times innumerable. From such a vague idea, we form no estimate 

 of the harmony of the air with the blood in its myriad-fold consti- 

 tution. The earth might as well be bare granite, and the atmo- 

 sphere, untinctured gas, if the vegetable kingdom has no organic 

 products to bestow through the medium of the air, upon the lungs 

 of animal tribes. Failing all analysis, we are bound to believe, 

 that the atmosphere varies by a fixed order parallel with that of the 

 seasons and climates ; that aromas themselves are abiding continents 

 and kingdoms ; and that the air is a cellarage of aerial wines, the 

 heaven of the spirits of the plants and flowers, which are safely 

 kept in it, without destruction or random mixture, until they are 

 called for by the lungs and skin of the animate tribes. Fact shows 

 this past all destructive analysis. It is also evident that accumula- 

 tion gees on in this kind, and that the atmosphere like the soil 

 alters in its vegetable depth, and grows richer or poorer from age to 

 age in proportion to cultivation. The progress of mankind would 

 be impossible, if the winds did not go with them. Therefore not 

 rejecting the oxygen formula, we subordinate it to the broad fact 

 of the reception by the atmosphere of the choicest produce of the 

 year, and we regard the oxygen more as the minimum which is 

 provided even in the sandy wilderness, or rather as the crockery 

 upon which the dinner is eaten, than as the repast that hospitable 

 nature intends for the living blood in the lungs. The assumption 

 that the oxygen is the all, would be tolerable only in some Esqui- 

 maux philosopher, in the place and time of thick -ribbed ice; there 

 is something too ungrateful in it for the inhabitant of any land 

 whose fields are fresh services of fragrance from county to county, 

 and from year to year. Chemistry itself wants a change of air, a 

 breath of the liberal landscape, when it would limit us to such 

 prison diet. 



Here, however, is a science to be undertaken; the study of the 

 atmosphere by the earth which it repeats ; of the mosaic pillars of 

 the landscape and climate in the crystal sky : of the map of the 



