les there are by
sound, or feeling, but this by fire) of all that lives; the only
means of our accurate knowledge of the things round us, and that
affect our lives: it is the _fountain_ of all life,--Byron does not
say the _origin_;--the origin of life would be the origin of the
sun itself; but it is the visible _source_ of vital energy, as the
spring is of a stream, though the origin is the sea. "And symbol of
Him who bestows it."--This the sun has always been, to every one
who believes there is a bestower; and a symbol so perfect and
beautiful that it may also be thought of as partly an apocalypse.]

[Footnote 7: 'More beautiful in that variety.'--This line, with the
one italicized beneath, expresses in Myrrha's mind, the feeling
which I said, in the outset, every thoughtful watcher of heaven
necessarily had in those old days; whereas now, the variety is for
the most part, only in modes of disagreeableness; and the vapor,
instead of adding light to the unclouded sky, takes away the aspect
and destroys the functions of sky altogether.]

[Footnote 8: 'Steam out of an engine funnel.'--Compare the sixth
paragraph of Professor Tyndall's 'Forms of Water,' and the
following seventh one, in which the phenomenon of transparent steam
becoming opaque is thus explained. "Every bit of steam shrinks,
when chilled, to a much more minute particle of water. The liquid
particles thus produced form a kind of water dust of exceeding
fineness, which floats in the air, and is called a cloud."

But the author does not tell us, in the first place, what is the
shape or nature of a 'bit of steam,' nor, in the second place, how
the contraction of the individual bits of steam is effected without
any diminution of the whole mass of them, but on the contrary,
during its steady _expansion_; in the third place he assumes that
the particles of water dust are solid, not vesicular, which is not
yet ascertained; in the fourth place, he does not tell us how their
number and size are related to the quantity of invisible moisture
in the air; in the fifth place, he does not tell us how cool
invisible moisture differs from hot invisible moisture; and in the
sixth, he does not tell us why the cool visible moisture stays
while the hot visible moisture melts away. So much for the present
state of 'scientific' information, or at least communicativeness,
on the first and simplest conditions of the problem before us!

In its wider range that problem embraces