Human Physiology, 



tion, softening, and the free action of the chemical forces which 

 life had held in check. The body putrifies ; gases are evolved, 

 disgusting and noxious compounds are formed ; and the body, 

 so full of life and beauty, becomes a nuisance and a horror 

 which we are glad to bury out of our sight. The body returns 

 to its elements, and after a time only dust and ashes remain 

 -a little lime, magnesia, potash, soda. The carbon has united 

 with oxygen to form carbonic acid; the nitrogen has passed 

 off as ammonia, and the hydrogen has evaporated as water. A 

 human body placed in an oven dries up to a weight of about 

 twelve pounds ; add more heat and it calcines into a few ounces. 

 Its matter enters into the organisation of vegetables and ani- 

 mals. Egyptian mummies are ground up and sold as manure 

 for English turnips and wheat, to make mutton and men, who 

 in their turn will furnish food for more vegetables and animals. 



And what then, the reader may ask, becomes of the great 

 Christian dogma of the Resurrection of the body. 



St. Paul, writing to the Christians of Corinth, says " Some 

 man will say : How are the dead raised up ? and with what body 

 do they come ? . . . . Thou sowest not that body which 

 shall be; but God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him. It 

 is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body." It is evi- 

 dent that the matter which is constantly entering the body and 

 leaving it is not the substantial body. The whole matter of 

 our body changes, some physiologists reckon, as often as once 

 in three months. The old matter is being continually wasted 

 and carried away. We live, therefore, so far as this matter is 

 concerned, in a constant succession of bodies ; but there is an 

 interior form which never loses its identity from first to last, 

 which is in the minute germ, which expands to the maturity of 

 life, which takes and uses all this constantly changing matter. 

 A man who weighs at one period of his life 120 Ibs. may grow 

 to weigh 300 Ibs., and then waste away again to a skeleton. 

 'This changing and superfluous matter is not to be considered 



