sely blended
and united, but likewise interchangeable, transformed in a perpetual
revolution: earth becoming water, water air, air ether, and so back
again in mixtures without end or number. The animals we destroy
contribute to preserve us, till we are destroyed to preserve other
things, and become parts of grass, or plants, or water, or air, or
something else that helps to make other animals, and they one another,
or other men, and these again into stone, or wood, or metals, or
minerals, or animals again, or become parts of all these and of a great
many other things, animals, or vegetables, daily consuming and devouring
each other--so true it is that everything lives by the destruction of
another. All the parts of the universe are in this constant motion of
destroying and begetting, of begetting and destroying, and the greater
systems are acknowledged to have their ceaseless movements as well
as the smallest particles, the very central globes of the vortices
revolving on their own axis, and every particle in the vortex
gravitating towards the centre. Our bodies, however we may flatter
ourselves, do not differ from those of other creatures, but like them
receive increase or diminution by nutrition or evacuation, by accretion,
transpiration, and other ways, giving some parts of ours to other
bodies, and receiving again of theirs, not altogether the same yesterday
as to-day, nor to continue the same to-morrow, being alive in a
perpetual flux like a river, and in the total dissolution of our system
at death to become parts of a thousand other things at once, our bodies
partly mixing with the dust and the water of the earth, partly exhaled
and evaporated into the air, flying to so many different places, mixing
and incorporating with numerous things.

"No parts of matter are bound to any one figure or form, losing and
changing their figures and forms continually, that is being in perpetual
motion, dipt, or worn, or ground to pieces, or dissolved by other parts,
acquiring their figures, and these theirs, and so on incessantly: earth,
air, fire, and water, iron, wood, and marble, plants and animals, being
rarefied, condensed, liquified, congealed, dissolved, coagulated, or
any other way resolved into one another. The whole face of the earth
exhibits those mutations every moment to our eyes, nothing continuing
one hour numerically the same; and these changes being but several kinds
of motion, are therefore the incontestable eff