double
picture, if one could but conjure it up. On the one side, the high-born
bucks, the mincing ladies, the scheming courtiers, pushing and planning,
and striving every one of them to attain his own petty object. Then for
a jump of a hundred years. What is this in the corner of the old vault?
Margarine and chlesterine, carbonates, sulphates, and ptomaines! We turn
from it in loathing, and as we go we carry with us that from which we
fly.

But, mind you, Bertie, I have a very high respect for the human body,
and I hold that it has been unduly snubbed and maligned by divines and
theologians: "our gross frames" and "our miserable mortal clay" are
phrases which to my mind partake more of blasphemy than of piety. It
is no compliment to the Creator to depreciate His handiwork. Whatever
theory or belief we may hold about the soul, there can, I suppose, be
no doubt that the body is immortal. Matter may be transformed (in which
case it may be re-transformed), but it can never be destroyed. If
a comet were to strike this globule of ours, and to knock it into a
billion fragments, which were splashed all over the solar system--if
its fiery breath were to lick up the earth's surface until it was peeled
like an orange, still at the end of a hundred millions of years
every tiniest particle of our bodies would exist--in other forms and
combinations, it is true, but still those very atoms which now form the
forefinger which traces these words. So the child with the same wooden
bricks will build a wall, then strew them on the table; then a tower,
then strew once more, and so ever with the same bricks.

But then our individuality? I often wonder whether something of that
wilt cling to our atoms--whether the dust of Johnnie Munro will ever
have something of him about it, and be separable from that of Bertie
Swanborough. I think it is possible that we DO impress ourselves upon
the units of our own structure. There are facts which tend to show that
every tiny organic cell of which a man is composed, contains in its
microcosm a complete miniature of the individual of which it forms a
part. The ovum itself from which we are all produced is, as you know,
too small to be transfixed upon the point of a fine needle; and yet
within that narrow globe lies the potentiality, not only for reproducing
the features of two individuals, but even their smallest tricks of
habit and of thought. Well, if a single cell contains so much, perhaps a
single mo