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The reality of Matter is said to be proved by its indestructibility; but this characteristic can easily be resolved into the indestructibility of Space and Extension which we have seen to be merely another name for the necessity or inevitable universality of the general laws and conditions of Energy transmutation, and the indestructibility of the Energy to the transmutations of which we attribute the forces of Cohesion and Gravitation.
It is somewhat of a rarity, called The Secret of Alchemy, or the Grand Doctrine of Transmutation Fully Explained, and was written by a Dr. Edward Duvall, a most extraordinary volume to have fallen into the hands of seamen. I stepped forward, greeting and being greeted. Besides the man I have mentioned they were four. The cook was a bullet-headed squat negro with a broken nose.
Van Helmont, in the same pursuit, discovered the properties of gas; Geber made discoveries in chemistry which were equally important; and Paracelsus, amidst his perpetual visions of the transmutation of metals, found that mercury was a remedy for one of the most odious and excruciating of all the diseases that afflict humanity.
In the last edition of his System of Nature, he began to wonder whether the transmutation of species by variation might not be possible. Then came the great poet who jumped over the facts to the conclusion.
Such phalanxed masses of fighters did the Carmagnoles ultimately become; but France ran a fearful risk in being obliged to rely on them when the process of their transmutation had barely commenced. The first events, indeed, of the war were disastrous and disgraceful to France, even beyond what might have been expected from the chaotic state in which it found her armies as well as her government.
Variation and natural selection may play their part, and so may specific creation also. Why not? This leads us to ask for the reasons which call for this new theory of transmutation. The beginning of things must needs lie in obscurity, beyond the bounds of proof, though within those of conjecture or of analogical inference.
So to speak, when the atom entered into the composition of the tree, it died to the mineral kingdom, and when consumed by the animal, it died to the vegetable kingdom, and so on until its transference or transmutation into the kingdom of man; but throughout its traversing it was subject to transformation and not annihilation.
The way in which the so-called elements are built up out of molecules corresponding in their configuration to the regular solids, and the explanations of their transmutation into one another based on the geometrical construction of these figures, is apt to strike the average reader as fantastic, but one of the most distinguished living mathematicians and physicists has stated that he is struck most of all by their resemblance to the scientific theories of the twentieth century.
He believed in the absolute equality of men before God, in the transmutation of souls: and the resurrection of the flesh seemed to him the utmost absurdity. He quite thought that there were future rewards and penalties, but he had too much faith in the goodness of God to suppose that the expiation could be eternal.
If he who was about to attempt the transmutation inquired how he was to destroy the specific properties, and the class properties, of the thing he proposed to change, and by what methods he was to obtain its Essence, and cause that Essence to produce the new thing, he would be told to travel along "the road which was followed by the Great Architect of the Universe in the creation of the world."
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