A plant exposed to the action of natural or artificial decomposition passes into air, leaving but a few grains of solid matter behind it. An animal, in like manner, is gradually resolved into “thin air.” Muscle, and blood, and bones, having undergone the change, are found to have escaped as gases, leaving only “a pinch of dust,” which belongs to the more stable mineral world. Our dependency on the atmosphere is therefore evident. We derive our substance from it--we are, after death, resolved again into it. We are really but fleeting shadows. Animal and vegetable forms are little more than consolidated masses of the atmosphere. The sublime creations of the most gifted bard cannot rival the beauty of this, the highest and the truest poetry of science. Man has divined such changes by the unaided powers of reason, arguing from the phenomena which science reveals in unceasing action around him. The Grecian sage’s doubts of his own identity, were only an extension of a great truth beyond the limits of our reason. Romance and superstition resolve the spiritual man into a visible form of extreme ethereality in the spectral creations, “clothed in their own horror,” by which their reigns have been perpetuated. When Shakespeare made his charming Ariel sing-- “Full fathom five thy father lies, Of his bones are coral made, Those are pearls that were his eyes: Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea change Into something rich and strange,” he painted, with considerable correctness, the chemical changes by which decomposing animal matter is replaced by a siliceous or calcareous formation. But the gifted have the power of looking through the veil of nature, and they have revelations more wonderful than even those of the philosopher, who evokes them by perpetual toil and brain-racking struggle with the ever-changing elements around him.