systems are acknowledged to have their ceaseless movements as well as the smallest particles, the very central globes of the vortices revolving on their own axis, and every particle in the vortex gravitating towards the centre. Our bodies, however we may flatter ourselves, do not differ from those of other creatures, but like them receive increase or diminution by nutrition or evacuation, by accretion, transpiration, and other ways, giving some parts of ours to other bodies, and receiving again of theirs, not altogether the same yesterday as to-day, nor to continue the same to-morrow, being alive in a perpetual flux like a river, and in the total dissolution of our system at death to become parts of a thousand other things at once, our bodies partly mixing with the dust and the water of the earth, partly exhaled and evaporated into the air, flying to so many different places, mixing and incorporating with numerous things. "No parts of matter are bound to any one figure or form, losing and changing their figures and forms continually, that is being in perpetual motion, dipt, or worn, or ground to pieces, or dissolved by other parts, acquiring their figures, and these theirs, and so on incessantly: earth, air, fire, and water, iron, wood, and marble, plants and animals, being rarefied, condensed, liquified, congealed, dissolved, coagulated, or any other way resolved into one another. The whole face of the earth exhibits those mutations every moment to our eyes, nothing continuing one hour numerically the same; and these changes being but several kinds of motion, are therefore the incontestable effects of universal action. But the changes in the parts make no change in the universe; for it is manifest that the continual alterations, successions, revolutions, and transmutations of matter, cause no accession or diminution therein, no more than any letter is added or lost in the alphabet by the endless combinations and transpositions thereof into so many different words and languages, for a thing no sooner quits one form than it puts on another, leaving as it were the theatre in a certain dress, and appearing again in a new one, which produces a perpetual youthfulness and vigor, without any decay or decrepitness of the world, as some have falsely imagined, contrary to reason and experience; the world, with all the parts and kinds thereof, continuing at all times in the same condition." *****