How stands it with the decomposition of animal and vegetable bodies when the influence of the vital and conservative power has been withdrawn? Let us attend to what an illustrious chemist has said on this subject:--“Universal experience teaches us, that all organized beings after death suffer a change, in consequence of which their bodies gradually vanish from the surface of the earth. The mightiest tree, after it is cut down, disappears, with the exception, perhaps, of the bark, when exposed to the action of the air for thirty or forty years. Leaves, young twigs, the straw which is added to the soil, juicy fruits, &c., disappear much more quickly. In a still much shorter time animal matters lose their cohesion; they are dissipated in the air, leaving only the mineral elements which they had derived from the soil.” “This grand natural process of the dissolution of all compounds formed in living organisms begins immediately after death, when the manifold causes no longer act, under the influence of which they were produced. The compounds formed in the bodies of animals and of plants undergo in the air, with the aid of moisture, a series of changes, the last of which are the conversion of their carbon into carbonic acid, of the hydrogen into water, of their nitrogen into ammonia, of their sulphur into sulphuric acid. Thus their elements resume the form in which they can again serve as food for a new generation of plants and animals. Those elements which had been derived from the atmosphere, take the gaseous form, and return to the air; those which the earth had yielded return to the soil. Death, followed by the dissolution of the dead generation, is the source of life for a new one. The same atom of carbon which is a constituent of a muscular fibre in the heart of a man, assists to propel the blood through his frame, was perhaps a constituent of the heart of one of his ancestors; and any atom of nitrogen in our brain has perhaps been a part of the brain of an Egyptian or of a negro. As the intellect of the men of this generation draws the food required for its development and cultivation from the products of the intellectual activity of former times, so may the constituents or elements of the bodies of a former generation pass into and become part of our own frames.” “The proximate cause of the changes which occur in organized bodies after death, is the action of the oxygen of the air on many of their constituents. This action only takes place when water--that is, moisture--is present, and a certain temperature is required for its production.”