mpt to get rid of one difficulty by
creating another far greater.

Chemists are equally at fault, in endeavoring to unvail the mysterious
processes of Life. Before its power they stand abashed. For Life controls
matter, and to a great extent overrules its combinations. An organized
being is not held together by ordinary chemical affinity; nor can
chemistry do any thing toward compounding organized tissues. The
principles which enter into the composition of the organized being are
few, the chief being charcoal and water, but into what wondrous forms does
Life mould these common elements! The chemist can tell you what these
elements are, and how they are combined, when dead; but when living, they
resist all his power of analysis. Rudolphi confesses that chemistry is
able to investigate only the lifeless remains of organized beings.

There are some remarkable facts connected with Animal Chemistry--if we may
employ the term--which show how superior is the principle of Life to all
known methods of synthesis and analysis. For example, much more carbon or
charcoal is regularly voided from the respiratory organs alone, of all
living beings--not to speak of its ejection in many other ways--than can be
accounted for, as having in any way entered the system. They also produce
and eject much more nitrogen than they inhale. The mushroom and mustard
plant, though nourished by pure water containing no nitrogen, give it off
abundantly; the same is the case with zoophytes attached to rocks at the
bottom of the sea; and reptiles and fishes contain it in abundance, though
living and growing in pure water only. Again, plants which grow on sand
containing not a particle of lime, are found to contain as much of this
mineral as those which grow in a calcareous soil; and the bones of animals
in New South Wales, and other districts where not an atom of lime is to be
found in the soil, or in the plants from which they gather their food,
contain the usual proportion of lime, though it remains an entire mystery
to the chemist where they can have obtained it. The same fact is
observable in the egg-shells of hens, where lime is produced in quantities
for which the kind of food taken is altogether inadequate to account: as
well as in the enormous deposits of coral-rock, consisting of almost pure
lime, without any manifest supply of that ingredient. Chemistry fails to
unravel these mysterious facts; nor can it account for the abundant
production of so