aterial things much in his
mind; for we find him alluding, in several passages, to the reciprocity
which subsists between the elements of animate and inanimate things,
and between the different members of the same kingdom;--as when, in
conversation with the king about the dead Polonius, he makes Hamlet say,
"A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat the fish
that hath fed of the worm"; or where, over the grave of Ophelia, he
traces the two ancient heroes back to their mother earth, in words some
of which we have quoted.

The ancient mythology, which shadowed forth some truth in all its
fables, turned these facts of Nature to its purpose. The gods of
Greece, when they saw fit to remove a human being from life, sometimes
reproduced him in another form of beauty, without any intermediate
stages of decay. Apollo seemed to have a particular fancy for planting
the boys and girls whom he had loved where he might enjoy their fragrant
society. Thus, a boy named Cyparissus, who had the misfortune to kill a
favorite deer, was so unwilling to be consoled, that he besought Apollo
to make his mourning perpetual; and the kind god changed him into a
cypress, which is still a funereal tree. The modest virgin Daphne, who
succeeded in escaping the violence of his passion, was transformed into
a laurel, which is ever green and pure. And the sweet youth Hyacinthus,
beloved of Apollo, being accidentally killed by a quoit which the god
of day was throwing, that divinity, in his grief, caused those sweet
flowers which bear his name to spring from his blood, where it fell upon
the ground. It is only in the annihilation of the intervals of time
between different forms of existence that these old metamorphoses, which
Ovid relates, are fabulous. If our readers will bear us company a
few steps, through ways which shall have diversions enough to forbid
weariness, we will endeavor to satisfy them that these apparent fables
are very near to every-day truths. We must begin with some plain
statements.

The air which we expel from the lungs at every breath has a large
proportion of carbonic acid. Let a man be shut up in an air-tight room
for a day, and he will have changed nearly all the oxygen in it into
this carbonic acid, and rendered it unfit for animal life. Dogs, cats,
and birds would die in it. But, poisonous as it is to man and other
animals, it is a feast to plants. They want it all day and every day;
not in the night,--at