da, by plants growing on a soil containing not an atom of
soda in any form: nor of gold in bezoards; nor of copper in some
descriptions of shell-fish. These extraordinary facts seem to point to
this--that many, if not most, of the elements which chemists have set down
as simple, because they have failed to reduce them further, are in reality
compound; and that what we regard as Elements, do not signify matters that
are undecompoundable, but which are merely undecompounded by chemical
processes. Life, however, which is superior to human powers of analysis,
resolves and composes the ultimate atoms of things after methods of its
own, but which to chemists will probably ever remain involved in mystery.

The last mystery of Life is Death. Such is the economy of living beings,
that the very actions which are subservient to their preservation, tend to
exhaust and destroy them. Each being has its definite term of life, and on
attaining its acme of perfection, it begins to decay, and at length ceases
to exist. This is alike true of the insect which perishes within the hour,
and of the octogenarian who falls in a ripe old age. Love provides for the
perpetuation of the species. "We love," says Virey, "because we do not
live forever: we purchase love at the expense of our life." To die, is as
characteristic of organized beings as to live. The one condition is
necessary to the other. Death is the last of life's functions. And no
sooner has the mysterious principle of vitality departed, than the laws of
matter assert their power over the organized frame.

"Universal experience teaches us," says Liebig, "that all organized
beings, after death, suffer a change, in consequence of which their bodies
gradually vanish from the surface of the earth. The mightiest tree, after
it is cut down, disappears, with the exception, perhaps of the bark, when
exposed to the action of the air for thirty or forty years. Leaves, young
twigs, the straw which is added to the soil as manure, juicy fruits, &c.,
disappear much more quickly. In a still shorter time, animal matters lose
their cohesion; they are dissipated into the air, leaving only the mineral
elements which they had derived from the soil.

"This grand natural process of the dissolution of all compounds formed in
living organizations, begins immediately after death, when the manifold
causes no longer act under the influence of which they were produced. The
compounds formed in the bodies of anima