glance at his wife, "do you blame your husband for rising above
the level of other men that he may lay at your feet the divine purple
of his glory, as a paltry offering in exchange for the treasures of your
heart! Ah, my Pepita," he cried, "you do not know what I have done. In
these three years I have made giant strides--"

His face seemed to his wife at this moment more transfigured under the
fires of genius than she had ever seen it under the fires of love; and
she wept as she listened to him.

"I have combined chlorine and nitrogen; I have decomposed many
substances hitherto considered simple; I have discovered new metals.
Why!" he continued, noticing that his wife wept, "I have even decomposed
tears. Tears contain a little phosphate of lime, chloride of sodium,
mucin, and water."

He went on speaking, without observing the spasm of pain that contracted
Josephine's features; he was again astride of Science, which bore him
with outspread wings far away from material existence.

"This analysis, my dear," he went on, "is one of the most convincing
proofs of the theory of the Absolute. All life involves combustion.
According to the greater or the lesser activity of the fire on its
hearth is life more or less enduring. In like manner, the destruction
of mineral bodies is indefinitely retarded, because in their case
combustion is nominal, latent, or imperceptible. In like manner, again,
vegetables, which are constantly revived by combinations producing
dampness, live indefinitely; in fact, we still possess certain
vegetables which existed before the period of the last cataclysm. But
each time that nature has perfected an organism and then, for some
unknown reason, has introduced into it sensation, instinct, or
intelligence (three marked stages of the organic system), these three
agencies necessitate a combustion whose activity is in direct proportion
to the result obtained. Man, who represents the highest point of
intelligence, and who offers us the only organism by which we arrive at
a power that is semi-creative--namely, THOUGHT--is, among all zoological
creations, the one in which combustion is found in its most intense
degree; whose powerful effects may in fact be seen to some extent in the
phosphates, sulphates, and carbonates which a man's body reveals to
our analysis. May not these substances be traces left within him of
the passage of the electric fluid which is the principle of all
fertilization? Would not ele