CHARCOAL. 163 



snuff? Why nature can make them serve more 

 purposes than man can serve by the most valuable 

 material that he knows. In as far as they con- 

 tain charcoal, nature can make them into marble, 

 and limestone, and black-lead for pencils, and 

 shells of all kinds, and every plant that grows, 

 and every animal that lives ; and, with very few 

 exceptions, all the parts of all those plants and 

 those animals. There is not only charcoal in 

 them all, but it is the charcoal that gives the soft 

 parts their firmness and solidity ; and part of the 

 brightest eye that now beams in England, may 

 once have been, and may be again, the snuff of a 

 candle. The " rival lustre," only it is a dead one, 

 and wants the " speculation" of the other, is char- 

 coal, and nothing but charcoal. 



To the unreflecting, it may seem very wonderful, 

 if not altogether incredible, that marble palaces, 

 and loaves of bread, and blooming roses, and clean 

 hands, and eloquent tongues, and smiling faces, 

 should all be made, and made with equal ease, 

 out of burnt sticks. But such parties should con- 

 sider whose working they are thinking of; and 

 then the whole becomes as simple as it is true. 

 And, if the patience of any reader, not accus- 

 tomed to think on such subjects, shall have car- 

 ried him thus far, we have no doubt that he will 

 find, in their " airy passage" from old to new, 

 and from death to life, enough to make him won- 

 der why he has not been an observer of nature all 

 the days of his life ; and, perchance, he may re- 

 gret that he has not. But there is no need for 

 regret; that only wastes time, and makes bad 

 worse, in all cases where we suffer it to intrude. 

 There is plenty of time still, if it were well applied ; 



