LAWS OF GOD IF FATUKE. 
7 
so arrange yonr chimney as to collect this invisible gaseous product 
of the burning of the coke—-an easily-managed operation which on 
a small scale has been performed by thousands of persons many 
thousands of times. And having collected it, weigh it. It will 
weigh practically forty-four pounds (actually 43*92). The twelve 
pounds of pure coke have taken thirty-two (actually 31*92) pounds 
of that part of the air which enables it to burn—for, as everybody 
knows, you cannot bum fuel without air—and has produced forty-two 
pounds of chimney-gas, which is invisible, it is true, like the air 
itself, but which is perfectly definite, perfectly tangible, and which 
has been proved over and over again to contain the twelve pounds 
of pure coke. But any one may demonstrate this truth for himself, 
for the laws of God in nature do not necessarily demand faith. 
Deal properly with the forty-two parts of chimney-gas and it will 
yield to you the twelve parts of coke you started with. The 
operation is costly; the recovered coke will cost you many more 
sovereigns than commercially it is worth pence; but it is an operation 
that has been performed by hundreds of men who in their desire 
and their search for truth care not what money, time, or effort they 
spend. What is the conclusion from the experiment ? It is this, 
that you may alter the form of the matter, you may convert visible 
black hard coke into invisible colourless soft gas, but you cannot 
actually destroy the coke. Aud what has been demonstrated 
respecting coke has been demonstrated—rigidly demonstrated by the 
most delicate balances—as regards hundreds of thousands of other 
substances. Nature knows not waste, knows not loss. You are 
daily converting your coal, your oil, 'your candles, your wood, into 
gases which pass either directly or through chimneys into the air, 
becoming, like the air, invisible, inodorous, tasteless; but your 
trees and shrubs absorb those gases, reconvert them into oil 
or wood, etc., which sooner or later are again used as fuel 
for your fires and flames, to be again sent on their cease¬ 
less round. One more illustration, again drawn from the incidents 
of every-day life, of the great truth or law of the indestructi¬ 
bility of matter. You eat food. A portion of that food, performing 
its appointed work within you, enables you to think and act, 
another portion burning inside you gives you that bodily warmth 
without which you could not live. Are the elements of the food 
destroyed ? Not a single one of the particles. These, having done 
their duty, pass to the air above us or to the ground beneath. 
"From the air and from the ground the vegetable again withdraws 
them, and with them builds up its own structure, sooner or later 
possibly to re-appear on our table, fresh from the glorious laboratory 
