Page:Hardwicke's Science-Gossip - Volume 1.pdf/161

Poverty makes a man acquainted with strange bedfellows, and philosophizing, or indulging in day-dreams, will often lead a man's thoughts in a very tortuous direction, and terminate in some unexpected climax. It appears, for instance, almost as absurd as to say that "black is white," to affirm that literally "all flesh is grass." Yet, curious enough, the "circle of life" passes from the mineral, through the vegetable, to the animal world, until it returns to "mother earth" again. The old doctrine of "transmigration of souls" may find but few believers in the West, but the transmigration of bodies is one of the facts of science. We might trace the hand that holds these pages, and the lips that smile over them, to the green grass of the meadows, the waving corn-field, the strawberry-bed, and through them to the mountain torrent, the limestone rock, and the dunghill.

If we would have the facts stated in a plain matter-of-fact way, let Professor Huxley do it for materials together and makes them up into its own substance. The animal eats the plant and appropriates the nutritious portions to its own sustenance, rejects and gets rid of the useless matters; and, finally, the animal itself dies, and its whole body is decomposed and returned into the inorganic world. There is thus a constant circulation from one to the other, a continual formation of organic life from inorganic matters, and as constant a return of the matter of living bodies to the inorganic world; so that the materials of which our bodies are composed are largely, in all probability, the substances which constituted the matter of long extinct creations, but which have in the interval constituted a part of the inorganic world."^[1] Herein lies, as almost in a nutshell, the philosophy of the "circle of life."

Sydney Smith calculated that during sixty years of his life he had devoured forty-four one-horse cart-loadsd of meat and drink more than was absolutely necessary for the support of his body. How many waggon-loads he really consumed in that period he does not tell. What an array of lowing bullocks and bleating sheep must represent, at the end of half a century's good living, the animal food a man consumes. This again represents the nutritive portion of scores of acres of turnips and pasture, and we know not how much oil-cake. A cow eats the grass in the meadow, assimilates all that is nutritious, ejects the rest to aid in producing a crop of good grass the following year. In the form of milk and butter, and calves-head, we devour the elaborated grass. The process of assimilation and rejection is repeated, until at last our bodies, like "the noble dust of Alexander," mingle with the soil, are ultimately turned over with the ploughshare, and stimulate the growth of fresh grass for cows to eat centuries hence, and supply milk and butter to a wiser generation of Englishmen, whose remote ancestors are still in the cradle.

So curious are the speculations in which such a subject causes us to indulge, that, like Frankenstein, we would fain flee in terror from the being of our own creation. We look at our hands and feet, and inquire whether atom by atom we have not eaten them; whether we have not been worse than cannibals, and devoured our own flesh and blood. Yea it would puzzle the physiologist to tell what minute portion of our body has not entered by our mouths. At the same time we day by day add to the mineral world products analogous to those which are absorbed by the grass, that feeds the cow, that gives us milk, or is eaten herself, to keep up the unceasing round of the "circle of life."

Nor is this all. This circle widens as we muse, and links us with the past as well as the future. We read of the bony framework of extinct animals, of monstrous Saurians laid bare by modern excavations, the soil surrounding which is brought to the surface, and with it the changed and modified flesh which clad those skeletons in bygone ages, and now forms an undistinguishable portion of the