

NO GROWTH IN MERE MATTER. 257 



If, in these cases, any quality which the substance 

 had previously shall disappear, we may always con- 

 clude that that depends on the combination ; but if 

 we find it in any substance that has been separated 

 by the process, it is either an originatquality of that 

 substance, or it depends on a combination which has 

 not yet been discovered: but which we may find 

 upon further examination. 



It is thus probable that there is no permanent 

 quality of any thing material ; but that all distinctions 

 which are apparent to our senses are the results of 

 combinations, all of which may be dissolved ; and 

 when that takes place, the old qualities vanish, and 

 new ones become apparent. 



We find, too, that there are many states of matter 

 that have the power (as we call it) of extending 

 themselves. Combustion, from a match or spark, 

 soon spreads over a vast quantity of combustibles. 

 Fermentation is produced in brewing and baking, by 

 adding yest to the dough, much in the same manner 

 as a crop is obtained by sowing seeds. Canker, 

 begun at a little hurt, will spread till it destroys a 

 tree; rot from one place will consume an entire 

 beam of timber; a spot of rust will in time destroy 

 a bar of steel; and a puncture with the fang of a 

 serpent, or a needle merely stained with the corrupt 

 matter of the dead and dissolving body, will breed 

 corruption in the living one, which no surgery can 

 arrest. 



But these and all the analogous cases are really 

 destructions, and when the process of destruction 

 is over, the power of destruction, as we call it, is 

 nowhere to be found, and all that we can say of it 

 merely is, that it is a state of matter, and no more 

 a kind of matter, or matter as independent existence 

 at all, than light, or heat, or gravitation. 



The tendency of those decompositions, so far as 

 they go, is to reduce all matter to one state to 

 bring it to the dust to prepare it as materials, just 

 YS 



