268 EXPANSIBILITY. 



period, occupied in transferring it, in a path 

 nearly parallel to the earth's surface ; its velo- 

 city must have been at the rate of 80 miles per 

 hour, or 1 17 feet per second of time. If a mass 

 such as this could have been hurried along 

 with such a velocity, how much faster may we 

 not suppose, those vast collected masses of 

 vapors, known by the name of clouds, can 

 be made to move? How much more intensely 

 fast must air itself move by itself, without 

 impediment or obstruction? When we re- 

 flect on the energy which such a power is 

 capable of exerting, we can be at no loss to 

 conceive how it is that the air which is generat- 

 ed during the process of putrefaction and fer- 

 mentation, has the power to separate and to 

 decompose vegetable and animal bodies alto- 

 gether into parts, and tin ally to resolve those 

 parts from a dead to a common state, to eject 

 corks from bottles, to fissure and break into 

 pieces the bottles themselves in which efferves- 

 cing liquors are contained, to overcome the 

 bond of union by which bodies the most solid 

 and compact are held together, to dislocate 

 and devallate mountains of the greatest magni- 

 tude into rocks, to lacerate those rocks into 

 fragments, to pulverise and granulate those 

 fragments into sand, the most subtle and mi- 

 nute, we can be at no loss to understand 

 how it is that the small quantity of air which is 



