112 THE METAMOKPHOSES OF MATTER. 



waiting for the dawn. And yet perchance it might happen 

 sooner than assumed. The charcoal-burner might lop off some 

 wooden stem in which the carbon of my dissolution was busy 

 at life work. 



Charcoal, next to its fair allotropic sister the diamond, is 

 perhaps the most indestructible thing in creation Nature's 

 slow agencies alone regarded. Century after century water 

 can flow over it without effecting one touch of dissolution. 

 Whether free in the air or buried in the earth, charcoal never 

 decays. Touched by fire, charcoal wakes out of its resting 

 sleep, indeed; assumes an invisible form, and fleets about 

 ready for other duties. More lasting is the diamond, though 

 far from meriting the designation aSa/me, which formerly it 

 won. Heat them enough, and diamonds burn, vanishing into 

 thin air. Can my disembodied spirit ever hope to see the 

 carbon-elements of that bodily frame which yielded her up in 

 death, glittering consolidated, transformed into the most beau- 

 tiful of all gems ? Given time enough a long time indeed 

 that event might come to pass. It must indeed be a long 

 time, except some ingenious chemist should take my carbon- 

 elements in hand and bend them to his purposes. I am not 

 sure that diamonds have not been artificially made : nay, I 

 am not quite sure they cannot be made by more than one 

 process. Many appearances go to beget the supposition that 

 diamonds have crystallised out of some fluid menstruum. 

 Occasionally little globules of fluid are to be seen within a 

 diamond, and occasionally, when an incautious observer has 

 exposed to heat a diamond of this sort, it has exploded with a 

 loud noise ; the liquid wholly disappearing. Taking cognis- 

 ance of this fact, taking cognisance, moreover, of the extreme 

 refrangibility of this imprisoned fluid, a modern chemist has 

 stated it as his belief, that it is nothing else than liquid car- 

 bonic acid ; a fluid that, if the presumption of analogy do not 

 lead the mind astray, should be capable of dissolving carbon, 

 and furnishing conditions favourable to crystallisation. 



