the infusorial animals. Alonzo Gray says millions
of them would not equal in bulk a grain of sand. Yet each of them
performs the functions of respiration, circulation, digestion,
and locomotion. Some of our blood-vessels are not a millionth of
our size. What must be the size of the ultimate particles that
freely move about to nourish an animal whose totality is too small
to estimate? A grain of musk gives off atoms enough to scent every
part of the air of a room. You detect it above, below, on every
side. Then let the zephyrs of summer and the blasts of winter sweep
through that room for forty years, bearing out into the wide world
miles on miles of air, all perfumed from the atoms of that grain
of musk, and at the end of the forty years the weight of musk has
not appreciably diminished. [Page 256] Yet uncountable myriads on
myriads of atoms have gone.

Our atom is not found yet. Many are the ways of searching for it
which we cannot stop to consider. We will pass in review the properties
with which materialists preposterously endow it. It is impenetrable
and indivisible, though some atoms are a hundred times larger than
others. Each has definite shape; some one shape, and some another.
They differ in weight, in quantity of combining power, in quality
of combining power. They combine with different substances, in
certain exact assignable quantities. Thus one atom of hydrogen
combines with eighty of bromine, one hundred and sixty of mercury,
two hundred and forty of boron, three hundred and twenty of silicon,
etc. Hence our atom of hydrogen must have power to count, or at
least to measure, or be cognizant of bulk. Again, atoms are of
different sorts, as positive or negative to electric currents.
They have power to take different shapes with different atoms in
crystallization; that is, there is a power in them, conscious or
otherwise, that the same bricks shall make themselves into stables
or palaces, sewers or pavements, according as the mortar varies.
"No, no," you cry out; "it is only according as the builder varies
his plan." There is no need to rehearse these powers much further;
though not one-tenth of the supposed innate properties of this
infinitesimal infinite have been recited--properties which are
expressed by the words atomicity, quantivilence, monad, dryad,
univalent, perissad, quadrivalent, and twenty other terms, each
expressing some endowment of power in this in visible atom. Refer
to one more presumed ab