114 THE METAMORPHOSES OF MATTER. 



phosphorus bodily. My observant ghost, looking calmly on, 

 may see an element of its once-cherished body blazing at the 

 end of a wooden match, doing duty in one of Sir William 

 Armstrong's shell-fusees, or made up into phosphor-paste, 

 luring rats to destruction. 



Decay and dissolution are never pleasant to think about. 

 They are passing changes that hardly bear unveiling, save 

 under the irradiation of the lamp of chemical knowledge; 

 which teaches that decay dissolution is not destruction. 

 No, decay is not pleasant to contemplate. It opens to new 

 regions of life and beauty, but the opening process is rough. 

 And even the very throes and travail and progeny of dis- 

 solution, so to say, sights which chill with horror, and odours 

 which, floating heavily on the breeze, seem like Pandora's 

 pestilent death-scattering maladies, even all this is beau- 

 tiful to reflect upon, as spirits may from other worlds looking 

 down, or philosophers in this. No, corruption is not nice : 

 bury it, then ; burn it, then. That is what Nature prompts 

 us to do, and that is why she made it so offensive. An 

 organism burnt, its elements are liberated at once ; and well- 

 pleased Nature absolves the living from the pest-laden odours 

 of the dead. Buried, corruption goes on indeed, but gently, 

 gradually ; and, if mother Earth be not overworked, for the 

 most part harmlessly. Not merely has earth the soil the 

 power of absorbing emanations and yielding them up gradu- 

 ally, but has the farther power of working chemical changes 

 upon them, so that they may be transmuted into other forms. 



The most deadly poisons known to chemists are products 

 of animal and vegetable bodies. Some of these are secreted 

 during life, others the products of chemical union. It is a 

 remarkable fact that all this class of poisons, without one 

 exception, are unstable, fleeting, and evanescent. Their com- 

 position is unstable ; their elements continually tending to fly 

 apart. The chemist cannot in many cases lay hold of them ; 

 they defy all his analysis. Nature seems to intimate, by the 



