There we see process dove-tailing with process, and spreading out over the material world in an endless network of cause and effect. We feebly try to trace out these interlacing threads, but we can follow them far in no direction. Proteus-like, they seem to change their aspect, blending now into one form, now into another, and so eluding our keenest pursuit. [Footnote 51: Cicero, _De Nat. Deor._ lib. i. 4. So, in Bacon's _Wisdom of the Ancients_, under the fable "Pan or Nature:"--"The chain of natural causes links together the rise, duration, and corruption; the exaltation, degeneration, and workings; the processes, the effects, and changes, of all that can any way happen to things." Such is the philosopher's explanation of the Destinies as sisters of Pan. In no part of his writings can the thorough practical character of Bacon's philosophy be more conspicuously seen than in his treatment of these ancient fables. Glancing over the titles of the different papers, you are tempted to wonder what an intellect which could only appreciate poetry as a mode of narrating history or as a vehicle for the teaching of truth, will make of such fairy tales as those of Pan, Orpheus, Proteus, Cupid, and many others. They seem like so many airy Naiads crushed within the iron grasp of a hundred-banded Briareus. But a perusal of those delightful pages will show that the giant has really no malevolent intentions towards his fair prisoners; nay, that he only wishes, by stripping them of their paint and finery, to show that, with all their lightness and grace, they are nevertheless strong buxom dames, of the same doughty race with himself.] As an instance, therefore, of this remarkable interlacing of different causes in what we call a single process, the disintegration of rocks deserves our attention. In ordinary language, we say a stone rots away, and its debris is washed down by the rains and streamlets, and the process does not at first sight seem at all more complex than the expression used to describe it; yet if we examine the subject, we shall ere long find that there are in nature many simpler things than the rotting away of a stone. To effect such a result, there come into play a whole category of agencies, chemical and mechanical, so combined in their operation, and so intimately blended in their effects, that it becomes no easy task to tell where one set ends and another begins.