"Our own organisms likewise, resolved into their ultimate particles, will help to form the bodies of our descendants. "Each molecule of air then goes on eternally from life to life, and escapes thence from death to death, by turns wind, wave, earth, animal, or flower. It is incorporated successively into the substance of numberless organisms. The air, the inexhaustible source whence everything that lives takes its breath, is yet an immense reservoir into which everything that dies pours its last sigh; by its absorption, vegetable and animal, different organisms come to life and afterwards perish. Life and death are both in the air we breathe, and perpetually succeed each other by the exchange of gaseous molecules; the molecule of oxygen which this old oak exhales will fly away to the lungs of a child in its cradle. The last sighs of a man will weave the brilliant corolla of a flower, or expand like a smile over the verdant meadow. And thus by an infinite series of partial deaths, the atmosphere incessantly nourishes the universal life spread over the surface of the world. "And if nevertheless some objection should still remain unanswered, I would go further, and add that our clothes as well as our bodies are composed of substances which at first were all gaseous. Take this thread, draw it out: what a resistance! How many webs of cambric, silk, linen, cotton, and wool industry have been formed by the help of these warps and woofs! And yet, what is a thread of linen, flax, or cotton? Globules of air in juxtaposition which are held together only by their molecular force. What is a thread of silk or wool? Another set of molecules in juxtaposition. Admit, then, that our clothes as well are air, gas, substances drawn in the beginning from the atmosphere,--oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, vapor of water, etc." * * * * * "I am glad to see," said the painter, "that art is not so far from science as is supposed in certain circles. If your theory is purely scientific to you, to me it is art, and of the best. Besides, do all these distinctions exist in Nature? In Nature there is neither art nor painting nor sculpture, music nor decoration, philosophy nor chemistry, nor astronomy nor meteorology. Look at the sky, the sea, those foot-hills of the Alps, those rosy evening clouds, those luminous perspectives towards the Italian coast,--all that is one. There is unity in everything. And since molecular philosophy demonstrates that there is no longer any body, that even the atoms in a bar of steel or platinum do not touch each other, no one will be the loser, provided our souls are left us." "Yes, it is a fact against which no prejudice can prevail,--living beings are souls clothed with air. I pity the worlds deprived of their atmosphere."