Page:The Black Cat v06no11 (1901-08).djvu/26

20 "but it was really done in accordance with nature's—and therefore God's—simplest laws, though it has taken generations to discover them. Many generations ago one of my ancestors began the work, so all the credit does not belong to me. I have only completed the task bequeathed from father to son through two centuries. But you comprehend the result—man's complete triumph over disease by this process of dissolution aad rehabilitation. The foundation was my ancestor’s discovery that every substance—iron, gold, or any metal, flesh, bone, gristle, etc.,—may be dissolved by some chemical or combination of chemicals, and his inference was that a universal solvent might by their combination, be discovered. He did not succeed, nor his son nor grandson, but four generations back that much was accomplished—the solvent was achieved, but the effort to restore the dissolved substances to their original state always failed. If a combination of metals was dissolved, the restorative fluid gave back no alloy, but the separate metals. If an organic substance—that is, vegetable or animal matter—was put in the solution, it could be restored, but unorganized—a chaotic mass of tissues.

"My grandfather made the next step forward, and his restoring chemical not only gave back iron for iron, but brass—which is an alloy—for brass, bronze for bronze, spelter for spelter, and so on. But when he dissolved an animal—say a sickly cat—he only recovered a great quantity of separate particles, though analysis showed that they contained every substance that the live cat had contained.

"My father—doubtless the greatest chemist that ever lived—left little for me to do, for he succeeded where his ancestors had failed, and the fluid which he devised would restore a dissolved animal to its original size and shape. Unfortunately, the restored cat, dog or guinea-pig was always dead. He worked to remedy this fault, on the natural supposition that it lay with the dissolving fluid, the invention of his predecessor. When I took up the labor independently after his death—having been his assistant for years—I did so on the hypothesis, which proved to be correct, that the imperfection was in my father's restorative fluid. It came to me as a revelation one day that, on principles which we had again and again proved to be true, the potentiality of life