166 ORIGIN OF SOCIETY. CANTO iv. 



Shout round the globe, how Reproduction strives 

 With vanquish'd Death, and Happiness survives; 

 How Life increasing peoples every clime, 

 And young renascent Nature conquers Time ; 



might not only amuse, as -an object of curiosity ; but by showing the 

 world the immediate sources of their pains and pleasures might teach 

 the means to avoid the one, and to procure the other, and thus 

 contribute both ways to increase the sum total of organic happiness. 



How Life increasing, 1. 453. Not only 'the vast calcareous pro- 

 vinces, which form so great a part of the terraqueous globe, and also 

 whatever rests upon them, as clay, marl, sand, and coal, were formed 

 from the fluid elements of heat, oxygen, azote, and hydrogen along 

 with carbon, phosphorus, and perhaps a few other substances, which 

 the science of chemistry has not yet decomposed; and gave the 

 pleasure of life to the animals and vegetables, which formed them; 

 and thus constitute monuments of the past happiness of those organized 

 beings. But as those remains of former life are not again totally de- 

 composed, or converted into their original elements, they supply 

 more copious food to the succession of new animal or vegetable 

 beings on their surface; which consists of materials convertible into 

 nutriment with less labour or activity of the digestive powers ; and 

 hence the quantity or number of organized bodies, and their im- 

 provement in size, as well as their happiness, has been continually 

 increasing, along with the soVid parts of the globe; and will proba- 

 bly continue to increase, till the whole terraqueous sphere, and all 

 that inhabit it shall dissolve by a general conflagration, and be again 

 reduced to their elements. 



Thus all the suns, and the planets, which circle round them, may 

 again sink into one central chaos; and may again by explosions pro- 



