art of surprise. 'Have you studied chemistry?' he
asked. 'With Lavoisier,' I answered. 'You are happy in being rich and
free,' he cried; then from the depths of his bosom came the sigh of a
man,--one of those sighs which reveal a hell of anguish hidden in the
brain or in the heart, a something ardent, concentrated, not to be
expressed in words. He ended his sentence with a look that startled
me. After a pause, he told me that Poland being at her last gasp he
had taken refuge in Sweden. There he had sought consolation for his
country's fate in the study of chemistry, for which he had always felt
an irresistible vocation. 'And I see you recognize as I do,' he added,
'that gum arabic, sugar, and starch, reduced to powder, each yield a
substance absolutely similar, with, when analyzed, the same qualitative
result.'

"He paused again; and then, after examining me with a searching eye, he
said confidentially, in a low voice, certain grave words whose general
meaning alone remains fixed on my memory; but he spoke with a force of
tone, with fervid inflections, with an energy of gesture, which stirred
my very vitals, and struck my imagination as the hammer strikes the
anvil. I will tell you briefly the arguments he used, which were to me
like the live coal laid by the Almighty upon Isaiah's tongue; for my
studies with Lavoisier enabled me to understand their full bearing.

"'Monsieur,' he said, 'the parity of these three substances, in
appearance so distinct, led me to think that all the productions of
nature ought to have a single principle. The researches of modern
chemistry prove the truth of this law in the larger part of natural
effects. Chemistry divides creation into two distinct parts,--organic
nature, and inorganic nature. Organic nature, comprising as it does all
animal and vegetable creations which show an organization more or less
perfect,--or, to be more exact, a greater or lesser motive power, which
gives more or less sensibility,--is, undoubtedly, the more important
part of our earth. Now, analysis has reduced all the products of
this nature to four simple substances, namely: three gases, nitrogen,
hydrogen, and oxygen, and another simple substance, non-metallic and
solid, carbon. Inorganic nature, on the contrary, so simple, devoid of
movement and sensation, denied the power of growth (too hastily
accorded to it by Linnaeus), possesses fifty-three simple substances, or
elements, whose different combinations make