EVOLUTION AND DISSOLUTION. 289 



gone before and of states which will come after; and, in- 

 deed, the greater part of our knowledge involves these 

 elements. Knowing any man personally, implies having be- 

 fore seen him under a shape much the same as his present 

 shape; and knowing him simply as a man, implies the in- 

 ferred antecedent states of infancy, childhood, and youth. 

 Though the man's future is not known specifically, it is 

 known generally: the facts that he will die and that his 

 body will decay, are facts which complete in outline the 

 changes to be hereafter gone through by him. So with all 

 the objects around. The pre-existence under concrete forms 

 of the woollens, silks, and cottons we wear, we can trace 

 some distance back. We are certain that our furniture 

 consists of matter which was aggregated by trees within 

 these few generations. Even of the stones composing the 

 walls of the house, we are able to say that years or centuries 

 ago, they formed parts of some stratum imbedded in the 

 earth. Moreover, respecting the hereafter of the wearable 

 fabrics, the furniture, and the walls, we can assert thus 

 much, that they are all in process of decay, and in 

 periods of various lengths will lose their present coherent 

 shapes. This general information which all men 



gain concerning the past and future careers of surround- 

 ing things, Science has extended, and continues unceas- 

 ingly to extend. To the biography of the individual man, 

 it adds an intra-uterine biography beginning with him as a 

 microscopic germ; and it follows out his ultimate changes 

 until it finds his body resolved into the gaseous products 

 of decomposition. Not stopping short at the sheep's back 

 and the caterpillar's cocoon, it identifies in wool and silk 

 the nitrogenous matters absorbed by the sheep and the cater- 

 pillar from plants. The substance of a plant's leaves, in 

 common with the wood from which furniture is made, it 

 again traces back to the vegetal assimilation of gases from 

 the air and of certain minerals from the soil. And in- 

 quiring whence came the stratum of stone that was quar- 



