the composition of the heavenly bodies, about which the most sanguine observer twenty years ago would have admitted that we should never know anything firmer than conjecture, is already the subject of exact observation. The names of Homer, Plato, and Shakspeare remind us how marvellously the world is imaged and reproduced in the minds of some great men, and of the share which we smaller men can take in their work by an admiring sympathy. A production of art, whether literary, pictorial, or plastic, is a creation. The things of Troy were not so touching nor so grand in their reality as they became in the form which the poet gave them. Legend enters largely into the stories of Macbeth and Hamlet. The histories are shadowy, but the plays are substantial; they contain some touch of truth. Old and young read them, and lend to the author all their feelings to work on as he will. Weigh this fact well. It seems to me to show so plainly that man's constitution has been fitted by foresight and preparation for the place in earth that he was to fill. Supposing that Moleschott was right in his startling aphorism, "Without phosphorus there is no thought," what a wonder are we forced to recognise here. The rage of Achilles, the death of Socrates, the resolute wickedness of Lady Macbeth, the character of her husband, so weak in his crime, so grand in his remorse and ruin; the refined and gentle Hamlet, forced by a preternatural command to assume the character of an avenger; to all these the presence of phosphorus in the brain is indispensable. How comes so small a cause to work such grand effects. It is sufficiently wonderful to hear Joachim discourse eloquent music upon the simplest of instruments, a violin; take away the violin and substitute a bit of wood; if the music still continues, what was before a wonderful exercise of skill is now miraculous. If great thoughts are but phosphorus burnt in the closed stove of a poet's brain, I am more ready than ever to admire that creative wisdom which could bring this out of that, which could so dispense with ordinary means in His highest productions. But the aphorism is not true as it stands. I believe there is no free phosphorus in the brain. "Without lime, no thought; without oxygen, no thought; without water, no thought." All these are true, and they import a well-known fact, that man who thinks is a creature in a material world, and that certain forms of matter are needful to his existence as an organised being.[3]