9

soon render the earth unfit for animal life; but that which animals
throw off as unfit any longer for their use, is that without which
vegetable life could not exist. That which is poison to the one is
food to the other. All vegetables absorb through their leaves this
Carbonic Acid, (to animals deadly poison,) and separate the carbon
so as with it to build up their structure; while they exhale the other
constituent, oxygen, to purify the air. There is thus ever kept up
a healthy balance in the atmosphere; and a constant and necessary
relation exists between vegetable and animal life. Where the one
exists in the greatest abundance, the other will also ever be found in
like ratio, and animals depend for their food on vegetable produc-
tion no more than vegetables on animals for the materials for their
structure. Every tree, plant and shrub that grows purifies the
atmosphere, and furnishes air for the use of man and the inferior
animals; every thing that breathes the air—from man, the lord of
the creation, to the veriest reptile—is a purveyor of food for vege-
table subsistence.

Wherever, therefore, animals abound, carbonic acid is largely
formed, but this carbonic acid, in giving its carbon to vegetables,
gives also its oxygen to purify the air, and furnishes the means of
breathing to men and animals. Decomposition of animals, and
the decay of vegetables also, afford both carbonic acid and am-
monia, the very materials for the growth of a new series of life.
The death of one generation thus becomes the source of life to
another, and each living generation is the phoenix arising from the
ashes of that which preceded it, a life whose very existence de-
pends upon previous death.

This is a type of what revelation teaches, that we shall not
"surely die;" but that death is but a means to and a necessary
precursor of a glorious resurrection.' There is taught, too, by this
simple yet beautiful and perfect process, the mutual dependence
which exists, not for pleasure only, but for life itself, between all
the systems of animated nature—that nothing is in vain.

Each humble plant that grows may be nourished by the breath
of the greatest of mankind, and in its turn purify the air for the
life of a hero. The frailest flower, though, perchance, "born to
blush unseen," does not "waste its fragrance on the desert air."
The perfume of flowers is a compound of carbonic acid and am-
monia, and may be taken up by corn, wheat, or any other plant
used as food by man.

There is ever going on a transmutation from living to dead mat-
ter, and these are ever assuming new and variable forms: the truth
can easily be believed by the chemist that

"Caesar dead and turn'd to clay,
May stop a hole to keep the wind away,"

and the fulfilment of the poetical prophecy:—