272 NO GROWTH IN MERE MATTER. 



results of combinations, all of which may be dis- 

 solved ; and when that takes place, the old qua- 

 lities 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 ex- 

 tending themselves. Combustion, from a match 

 or spark, soon spreads over a vast quantity of 

 combustibles. Fermentation is produced in brew- 

 ing and baking, by adding yeast 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 as the active operations which are carried on 

 in a populous and busy city, reduce streets, and 

 houses, and furniture to dust, and prepare them 

 for the brickmakers and the builders ; so that the 

 city may partly do in fact, what was fabled of .the 

 Phoenix arise again out of its own ashes. If the 

 brickmaker and the builder were to stay their 

 hands, the city would soon become uninhabitable - r 



