Scientists have acquired a chemical analysis that is nearly bewildering to the uninitiated; they can resolve almost any object in nature to its original elements; they can bring to bear forces that will rend asunder and tear in pieces those forms and substances that have been erected and finished in a very elaborate manner. There is nothing, seemingly, but gives way to the accomplished chemist. There is not a rock or metal, however solid, that heat will not dissipate into vapor. Even the diamond itself, may, by heat, be made to float in the atmosphere. Conditions of matter, once called imponderable substances, float out of existence, leaving behind only vibrations or agitations of the one unchangeable reality termed matter. All solids are peculiar combinations of gases. Analyze the materials of the three great kingdoms of nature and reduce them all to gases. The waters of the ocean are composed of two gases. The vegetables are principally composed of gases, and one single gas, oxygen, constitutes nearly, if not one-half, of the earth now known to man. The rapid transition of bodies from the gaseous form to the liquid, is astounding. Heat is the all-powerful solvent of all organic matter, and by heat the solid earth itself may be again dissolved; we may then conclude its now solid materials were once a vaporous mass. Had there been no law in nature by which matter could be etherealized, then all would have remained in the materialized condition. Laws are the most descended modification of the Divine Mind; while essences are the most ascended form and condition of matter. By the marriage of laws with essences, we obtain, on one side, all the successive condescensions and condensations of matter, and, on the other side, all the evolutions and manifestations of mind. The great object of philosophy is to ascertain the simple ultimate, into which all the phenomena of nature may by analysis be resolved. COSMICAL ARRANGEMENTS AND TERRESTRIAL ADAPTATIONS. God has created a special agency, chemical force-through which all material things are created. All the gases in the atmosphere are ready to leap into combination in precise and orderly obedience to this law. By appropriate agencies, the Divine Architect formed little cells, and from these, ultimately, through a long routine-the tree laden with fruit. Chemical diversities seem endless in number and immeasurable in extent—the most mysterious of all truths is that of the conservation of forces. The five simple elementsoxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon and calcium-are the principal ones that form our bodies—our lives are supported in oxygen, but we die in nitrogen. Motion Motion is at the bottom of all phenomena. explains the weight as well as the rarity of bodies. Matter assumes multitudinous forms and ceaselessly varies them. Rotation produces oblateness. Dynamic laws give the same results, whether in a large or small scale. The climacteric form of matter is spheroidal, a law of infallible geometry. The globe-form, which is the perfectly round or sphere form, is not possible in a body which constantly and rapidly revolves in one direction. The details of science are only repellent to those who have not acquired a special knowledge of the elements on which it is based, or have not yet become acquainted with the magnificent simplicities of nature. Problems which have been solved may not be considered unique and final, but only as established realities. Particular circumstances which formerly were a matter of merely independent record of separate occurrences and facts, are now, through the increased light of science, becoming to be understood as indissolubly conjoined by laws so discovered. The separate occurrences and facts which might hitherto have seemed casual and without reason now seem to be like that which takes place when we attempt to read a sentence written in difficult characters; at first the characters seem arbitrary and disjointed, but at last the true supposition occurs and the truth flashes out from every part of the inscription. Of the hundreds of thousands of Christians to-day, but few are familiar with the supreme facts of the universe; these celestial facts, not fancies, are as numerous as the sands of the sea. Between the center and the two poles of the earth lies the whole philosophy of mineral, vegetable, animal, human and angel existence. We need no other revelation of God, and no other teacher than reverent reason. The world does not look With that deep insight which detects All great things in the small, And learn how each one's life affects The incessant formation of countless streams of ribbonlike rivers of electricity in the air, and from three to ten miles above the heads of mankind all over the round world, is in itself a scientific wonder, and is the cause of innumerable phenomena. It is an invisible, natural fact at the basis of all atmospheric motions; it causes all electric variation, and explains the dipping and fluttering of the magnetic needle. It is the primal cause of climatic alteration in the far upper strata of the atmosphere, the cause of the formation of banks of auroral vapor, and of certain boreal clouds of unrivaled brightness and beauty. A luminiferous ether floods infinite space; it is within and without all things; it fills all things; it is the fire of suns, the force of stars, the purifying presence in mineral structures, the links in the life of plants, the power which circulates the blood in animals, the bridge by which man materially is connected to man spiritually. The gases, until recently, have been called imponderables. But it has been discovered that a solid body may be elevated in temperature and liquefied, even etherealized, and the reverse; and that the so-called imponderables can be reduced progressively down to the fluid state by the persistent application of cold. Four thousand one hundred and ten pounds of atmospheric pressure upon hydrogen as an invisible gas, forced it to become a materialized and visible fluid. The cold of space is estimated as two hundred and thirty-nine degrees below zero. This enormous cold would be adequate to the reduction of hydrogen to a palpable fluid. Thus the freezing cold of space would seem to be something frightful to contemplate, as traversed by spirit; but we do not go out after death with these chronothermal nerves; hydrogen is not our after-death envelopment. No science of chemistry, no theory of electricity, no philosophy of geological development, no system of meteorology, no explanation of planetary revolution and harmony, can be even approximately complete without some definite and practical knowledge concerning these invisible yet substantial elemental circulations which exist and labor in the vast upper spaces. On the soft golden bosom of these celestial and magnetic currents, the death-emancipated float into their celestial home. Now with swifter, swifter motion, Swaying with the swaying tide; Onward to the shoreless ocean Of Eternity, we glide. ALL UNPARTICLED MATTER IS IMPERISHABLE. Spirit is an indissoluble unity of the finest particles of matter. All matter becomes spirit, because matter and motion, or matter and mind, are eternal. All the matter composing our earth will be refined into spirit. By comprehending general principles, assisted by an enlarged view of their correspondences, nature and her laws will appear as one vast chemical laboratory, in which the lowest constituents of the whole composition are constantly being developed and purified. And the whole is a compound of polygastric globules, whose power of chemical action and principles of progression unfold all the forms that are developed from the great mass, which again produce new substances and new modes of composition, each being unlike the first. Every particle of matter, at some time. during the course of ages, passes through and becomes a part of animal life. The hardest substance that is existing in the earth, the earth itself, will ultimately, and at different periods, compose some parts or particles of animal existence. We can form no idea of the size of the ultimate atom. We cannot comprehend the degree of etherealization to which matter may be extended. Our atmosphere is only another condition of the same elements which compose all the organized forms of matter upon the earth, and, at the height reached by man, it is in a state of extreme attenuation. Matter is supposed to be so far attenuated as to form a universal ether; to be dissolved by force in infinite space, and resolved into such minute particles as to be no longer subject to attraction. The all-pervading essence contained in nature is of itself an immortal principle. The systems of suns and planets, with all their appendages and the vast assemblages of worlds Y |