Your analytical chemist sadly annihilates, with his scientific machinations, all poetry. He bottles up at pleasure the Nine Muses, and proves them—as the fisherman in the Arabian Nights did the Afrite—to be all smoke. Even the Will o’ the Wisp cannot flit across its own morass without being pursued, overtaken, and burnt out by this scientific detective policeman. He claps an extinguisher upon Jack o’ Lanthorn thus:—He says that a certain combination of phosphorus and hydrogen, which rises from watery marshes, produces a gas called phosphuretted hydrogen, which ignites spontaneously the moment it bubbles up to the surface of the water and meets with atmospheric air. Here again, the Ithuriel wand of science dispels all delusion, pointing out to us, that in such places animal and vegetable substances are undergoing constant decomposition; and as phosphorus exists under a variety of forms in these bodies, as phosphate of lime, phosphate of soda, phosphate of magnesia, &c., and as furthermore the decomposition of water itself is the initiatory process in these changes, so we find that phosphorus and hydrogen are supplied from these sources; and we may therefore easily conceive the consequent formation of phosphuretted hydrogen. This gas rises in a thin stream from its watery bed, and the moment it comes in contact with the oxygen of the atmosphere, it bursts into a flame so buoyant, that it flickers with every breath of air, and realises the description of Goëthe’s Mephistopheles, that the course of Jack-o’-lantern is generally “zig-zag.”