By chemical discoveries, useful processes which once required months, or even years, are now effected in a few days. The chemist has found means to separate one of several properties from a drug, so that its medicinal effect may be undiminished and unaffected by other combined properties originally with it. Light, which formerly was furnished only by the valuable substances of wax, tallow, spermaceti or oil, has been supplied of a better quality, from the cheapest and most abundant objects in nature; and these improvements are but the precursors of the more splendid retinue which are hereafter destined to make their appearance. This science gives us assurance that all those substances which are most indispensable to man, because they repair the waste which is unceasingly going on in his bodily frame, are dispersed in boundless profusion throughout the universe, but under forms and combinations which conceal them from our unassisted senses; and that it may be within the scope of human art to separate those which are nutritious, and assimilate with our system, from those that are of a noxious or neutral character, and thus to modify the law which has hitherto limited the numbers of mankind. It is now thought whatever vegetable substances can be made soluble can be made digestible, in proof of which, a German chemist[3] has already succeeded in converting ligneous substances into wholesome aliment; and it has long been known that sugar may be made by a similar chemical conversion. What would have been the transmutation for which the alchemist of former days consumed so many anxious days and sleepless nights, compared with these? Gold owes its extraordinary value to its scarcity, and had the adept succeeded in making it at pleasure, he would have lessened its value in the same proportion as he increased the quantity. If he could have converted copper into gold, the gold would have been worth no more than the copper, except for the expense of the transmutation. And if society had gained some advantage in being able to substitute it for metals that are liable to rust, yet it would have lost as much by the destruction of its property of containing great value in a small bulk, and its consequent unfitness to perform the functions of money. [Footnote 3: Professor Autenrieth of Tubingen.] It is not improbable that some of these splendid visions of science may never be realized: but then other discoveries and improvements may take place of equal and greater importance; and should those hopes be verified, would they exhibit a greater triumph of art than has been witnessed in our day? they are certainly not more beyond the bounds of seeming probability than balloons, and diving bells, and rail roads, would have appeared to a former age.