l found dead together. The fact
was unquestionable; and the safety-lamp was undiscovered.

Never was a philosophical imagination more beautiful than that exquisite
_Palingenesis_, as it has been termed from the Greek, or a regeneration:
or rather the apparitions of animals and plants. Schott, Kircher,
Gaffarel, Borelli, Digby, and the whole of that admirable school,
discovered in the ashes of plants their primitive forms, which were
again raised up by the force of heat. Nothing, they say, perishes in
nature; all is but a continuation, or a revival. The semina of
resurrection are concealed in extinct bodies, as in the blood of man;
the ashes of roses will again revive into roses, though smaller and
paler than if they had been planted; unsubstantial and unodoriferous,
they are not roses which grow on rose-trees, but their delicate
apparitions; and, like apparitions, they are seen but for a moment! The
process of the _Palingenesis_, this picture of immortality, is
described. These philosophers having burnt a flower, by calcination
disengaged the salts from its ashes, and deposited them in a glass
phial; a chemical mixture acted on it, till in the fermentation they
assumed a bluish and a spectral hue. This dust, thus excited by heat,
shoots upwards into its primitive forms; by sympathy the parts unite,
and while each is returning to its destined place, we see distinctly the
stalk, the leaves, and the flower arise; it is the pale spectre of a
flower coming slowly forth from its ashes. The heat passes away, the
magical scene declines, till the whole matter again precipitates itself
into the chaos at the bottom. This vegetable phoenix lies thus concealed
in its cold ashes till the presence of heat produces this
resurrection--in its absence it returns to its death. Thus the dead
naturally revive; and a corpse may give out its shadowy re-animation
when not too deeply buried in the earth. Bodies corrupted in their
graves have risen, particularly the murdered; for murderers are apt to
bury their victims in a slight and hasty manner. Their salts, exhaled in
vapour by means of their fermentation, have arranged themselves on the
surface of the earth, and formed those phantoms, which at night have
often terrified the passing spectator, as authentic history witnesses.
They have opened the graves of the phantom, and discovered the bleeding
corpse beneath; hence it is astonishing how many ghosts may be seen at
night, after a recent battl