THE CHICLE OF LIFE. 



Hamlet. To what base uses we may return, Horatio ! Why may not hnaginaticn trac3 the noble 



dust of Alexander till he find it stopping a bung-hole ? 

 Horatio. 'Twerc to consider too curiously, to consider so. 



Hamlet. No, faith, not a Jot, but to follow him thither with modesty enough, and likelihood to 

 - lead it. Shakespeare's Hamlet. 



T>0VETITY makes-a man acquainted with strange 

 -^ bedfellows, and philosophizing, or indulging in 

 day-dreams, will often lead a man's thoughts in 

 a very tortuous direetion, and terminate in some 

 unexpected climax. It appears, for instance, almost 

 as absurd as to say that " black is white," to afSrm 

 that literally '^all flesh is grass." Yet, curious 

 enough, the " eircle of life " passes from the mineral, 

 through the Vegetable, to the animal world, until it 

 returns to "mother earth" again. The old doctrine 

 of "transmigration of souls" may find but few 

 believers in the West, but the transmigration of 

 bodies is one of the facts of science. We might 

 trace the hand that holds these pages, and the lips 

 that smile over them, to the green grass of the 

 meadows, the waving corn-field, the strawberry-bed, 

 and through them to the mountain torrent, the 

 limestone rock, and the dunghill. 



If we would have the facts stated in a plain 

 matter-of-fact way, let Professor Huxley do it for 

 us. ' "The plant," he says, "gathers inorganic 

 materials together and makes them up into its own 

 substance. The anunal eats the plant and appro- 

 priates the nutritious portions to its own sustenance, 

 rejects and gets rid of the useless matters; and, 

 finally, the animal itself dies, and its whole body 

 is decomposed and returned into the inorganic 

 world. There is thus a constant circulation from 

 one to the other, a continual formation of organic 

 life from inorganic matters, and as constant a return 

 of the matter of living bodies to the inorganic 

 world; so that the materials of which our bodies 

 are composed are largely, in all probability, the 

 substances which constituted the matter of long 

 extinct creations, but which have in the interval 

 constituted a part of the inorganic world." * Herein 

 lies, as almost in a nutshell, the philosophy of the 

 "circle of life." 



Sydney Smith calculated that during sixty years 

 of his life he had devoured forty-four one-horse cart- 



* Huxley's " Lectures on the Origin of Species. 

 Hardwicke. 



London : 



loads of meat and drink more than was absolutely 

 necessary for the support of his body. How many 

 waggon-loads he really consumed in that period he 

 does not tell. What an array of lowing bullocks 

 aud bleating sheep must represent, at the end of 

 half a century's good living, the animal food a mau 

 consumes. This again represents the nutritive por- 

 tion of scores of acres of turnips and pasture, and 

 we know not how much oil- cake. A cow eats the 

 grass in the meadow, assimilates all that is nutri- 

 tious, ejects the rest to aid in producing a crop of 

 good grass the following year. In the form of milk 

 and butter, and calves-head, we devour the elabo- 

 rated grass. The process of assimilation and rejec- 

 tion is repeated, until at last our bodies, like "the 

 noble dust of Alexander," mingle with the soil, are 

 ultimately turned over with the ploughshare, and 

 stimulate the growth of fresh grass for cows to eat 

 centuries hence, and supply milk and butter to 

 a wiser generation of Englishmen, v/hose remote 

 ancestors are still in the cradle. 



So curious are the speculations in which such a 

 subject causes us to indulge, that, like Frankenstein, 

 we would fain flee in terror from the being of our 

 own creation. We look at our hands aud feet, and 

 inquire whether atom by atom we have not eaten 

 them ; whether we have not been worse than 

 cannibals, and devoured our own flesh aud blood. 

 Yea it would puzzle the physiologist to tell what 

 minute portion of our body has not entered by our 

 mouths. At the same time we day by day add to 

 the mineral world products analogous to those 

 which are absorbed by the grass, that feeds the 

 cow, that gives us milk, or is eaten herself, to keep 

 up the unceasing roimd of the " circle of life." 



Nor is this all. This circle widens as we muse, 

 and links us with the past as well as the futui-e. 

 We read of the bony framework of extinct animals, 

 of monstrous Saurians laid bare by modern excava- 

 tions, the soil surrounding which is brought to the 

 surface, and with it the changed aud modified flesh 

 which clad those skeletons in bygone ages, and 

 now forms an undistinguisbable portion of the 



