natural processes, lifeless natures taken
as nutriment become vitalized, yet is a lifeless nature, under any
circumstances, capable of a living transmission, with all its qualities
as a lifeless nature unchanged? If, sir, nothing can be incorporated
with the living body but by assimilation, and if that implies the
conversion of one thing to a different thing (as, in a lamp, oil is
assimilated into flame), is it, in this view, likely, that by banqueting
on fat, Calvin Edson will fatten? That is, will what is fat on the board
prove fat on the bones? If it will, then, sir, what is iron in the vial
will prove iron in the vein.' Seems that conclusion too confident?"

But the sick man again turned his dumb-show look, as much as to say,
"Pray leave me. Why, with painful words, hint the vanity of that which
the pains of this body have too painfully proved?"

But the other, as if unobservant of that querulous look, went on:

"But this notion, that science can play farmer to the flesh, making
there what living soil it pleases, seems not so strange as that other
conceit--that science is now-a-days so expert that, in consumptive
cases, as yours, it can, by prescription of the inhalation of certain
vapors, achieve the sublimest act of omnipotence, breathing into all but
lifeless dust the breath of life. For did you not tell me, my poor sir,
that by order of the great chemist in Baltimore, for three weeks you
were never driven out without a respirator, and for a given time of
every day sat bolstered up in a sort of gasometer, inspiring vapors
generated by the burning of drugs? as if this concocted atmosphere of
man were an antidote to the poison of God's natural air. Oh, who can
wonder at that old reproach against science, that it is atheistical? And
here is my prime reason for opposing these chemical practitioners, who
have sought out so many inventions. For what do their inventions
indicate, unless it be that kind and degree of pride in human skill,
which seems scarce compatible with reverential dependence upon the power
above? Try to rid my mind of it as I may, yet still these chemical
practitioners with their tinctures, and fumes, and braziers, and occult
incantations, seem to me like Pharaoh's vain sorcerers, trying to beat
down the will of heaven. Day and night, in all charity, I intercede for
them, that heaven may not, in its own language, be provoked to anger
with their inventions; may not take vengeance of their inventions