634 DISAPPEARANCE OF CREDULITY. 



if a man looked, he would find reflected all the future events of his life. 

 He who had seen the phantasmagoria cast upon smoke in these myste- 

 rious laboratories, now so little that the eye could scarcely discern their 

 form, and now expanding to a gigantic stature and rushing forth, was 

 duly prepared to credit the legends of brazen men who could speak and 

 even prophesy, nay, whose limbs would continue to grow unless the de- 

 mon that possessed them was cast out. A vial of that which we call 

 ammonia, the mere smelling of which can recall one from a swoon, was 

 a very fair earnest of the elixir of life. JSTo prodigy was too great to be 

 believed. As in dreams, nothing was too impossible, nothing too con- 

 tradictory. Men who could make themselves invisible even without the 

 romantic aid of a ring ; incombustible sages who could wash themselves 

 in melted copper, and sit at their ease in flaming straw ; alchemists in 

 possession of the philosopher's stone, but their stomachs as empty as their 

 bellows ; monks carrying about fairies shut up in glass vials, into which 

 Gr d l disa they had been decoyed by distilled dew ; salamanders which 

 pearance of ere- had been engendered in a fire maintained without ever go- 

 ing out for forty years ; a rain in Egypt in which there fell 

 multitudes of little men of less than one span, clothed in black garments, 

 and with mitres like bishops : these were all facts in the philosophy of 

 that day. The explosions and choke-damp of mines were not disentan- 

 gled from spectres and faces of abominable appearance which had been 

 seen in those subterranean solitudes by numberless witnesses until the 

 dawn of pneumatic chemistry. The palingenesis, or resurrection of roses 

 and apparitions of flowers, so acceptable in doctrinal theology, continued 

 to be received until crystallography was cultivated. These wonders have 

 all passed away. 



The character which marks this change is the gradual dropping of mys- 

 tery and the supernatural. The same career is followed from infancy to 

 maturity, both in the individual and in society. 



It is not necessary to pursue any further this historical outline. It 

 would bring us to events which can scarcely be spoken of with correct- 

 ness and impartiality, on account of their nearness to our own times. 

 Here, therefore, we may pause, to collect such inferences and present such 

 reflections as the facts we have offered suggest. 



It may, then, be observed, that the old white inhabitants of Europe 

 Ph siolo ical were no * a ^ e * commence their civilization from their own 

 change of Eu- interior resources, but were thrown into that career by the ex- 

 ample and aid of a more southern and darker people, whose 

 climate was more favorable. The artificial change which spread by de- 

 grees over Europe, through the introduction of more comfortable modes 

 of life, at last compensated for the natural climate defect, and the Euro- 

 pean entered on the course of advancement, undergoing, as we have seen 

 in the last chapter, a physical as well as a mental change. 



