Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/410

394 cannot suffer from the thoughts now occurring to us. We establish with such objects a relationship, I had almost said a friendship; they become, as it were, a part of ourselves, things essential to our own existence; and that deep attachment we feel to the place of our birth, or our home, finds its apology not alone in natural instinct, or in acquired habits, but also in the highest philosophical considerations. In imagination we might mark off groups in the two kingdoms which are the fanciful representations or counterparts of each other. Perhaps we men, who have to resist the storms of life, may have our representatives in the rugged trees of the forest; the ladies will certainly find their antagonists among roses and other flowers.

From what has been said, you will have gathered how important is the part which oxygen plays in the scheme of Nature. To it is committed the duty of destroying all animal races, and transferring the parts of which their bodies are composed to plants. It begins to discharge this function the moment we begin to breathe, pervading each instant every part of our bodies, bringing on interstitial death, and the continuous removal of particle after particle which it carries away. For there is an incessant change in the substance of all living structures; that which we are to-day differs from that of yesterday and to-morrow, and this untiring agent is all the time at work, assaulting and undermining, nor stopping its action with our dissolution, but going with us into the tomb, until it has restored every particle back to the air. Death is not, as the popular superstition says, a phantom skeleton, nor, as the Asiatics think, a turbaned horseman, who pays his sudden and unwelcome visits. He is this invisible principle in the air which surrounds us, and which is in the very breath we respire.

If thus the duration of individuals and races is determined by the two great systems of forces which have been combined into a self-acting contrivance, it surely is one of the most interesting inquiries in which we can engage, to find in what way so extraordinary a combination has been established. From those remote periods to which we are able to trace the history of the earth, has the same kind of agency prevailed, or have other laws and other self-acting contrivances been resorted to in other times? You see I here assume the doctrine of the geological antiquity of the earth without any kind of hesitation. During two centuries its spherical form was bitterly denied by many very good and well-meaning men. But the truth at last prevailed. And during the last fifty years its age has in a similar way, and on similar principles, been contested. But this, like the former, is now a settled question; neither the one nor the other is any longer open to debate. He who thinks the earth is only a few thousand years old, simply knows nothing about the matter. He who denies its antiquity will also probably deny its figure.

I proceed, then, rapidly with the inquiry in which we are engaged,