of a medical man--to whose professional
ability I have good testimony--who finds the vital principle in highly
rarefied oxygen. With the usual logic of such thinkers, he dismisses the
"eternal personal identity" because "If soul, spirit, mind, which are
merely modes of sensation, be the attribute or function of nerve-tissue, it
cannot possibly have any existence apart from its material organism!" How
does he know this _impossibility_? If all the mind _we_ know be from
nerve-tissue, how does it appear that mind in other planets may not be
another thing? Nay, when we come to _possibilities_, does not his own
system give a queer one? If highly rarefied oxygen be vital power, more
highly rarefied oxygen {41} may be more vital and more powerful. Where is
this to stop? Is it _impossible_ that a finite quantity, rarefied _ad
infinitum_, may be an Omnipotent? Perhaps the true Genesis, when written,
will open with "In the beginning was an imperial quart of oxygen at 60
deg. of Fahrenheit, and the pressure of the atmosphere; and this oxygen
was infinitely rarefied; and this oxygen became God." For myself, my
aspirations as to this system are Manichaean. The quart of oxygen is the
Ormuzd, or good principle: another quart, of hydrogen, is the Ahriman, or
evil principle! My author says that his system explains Freewill and
Immortality so obviously that it is difficult to read previous speculations
with becoming gravity. My deduction explains the conflict of good and evil
with such clearness that no one can henceforward read the New Testament
with becoming reverence. The surgeon whom I have described is an early bud
which will probably be nipped by the frost and wither on the ground: but
there is a good crop coming. Material pneuma is destined to high functions;
and man is to read by gas-light.

THE SUN AN ELECTRIC SPACE.

The solar system truly solved; demonstrating by the perfect harmony of
the planets, founded on the four universal laws, the Sun to be an
electric space; and a source of every natural production displayed
throughout the solar system. By James Hopkins.[82] London, 1849, 8vo.

The author says:

"I am satisfied that I have given the true _laws_ constituting the _Sun_ to
be _space_; and I call upon those disposed to maintain the contrary, to
give true _laws_ showing him to be a body: until such can be satisfactorily
established, I have an undoubted claim to the credit of my theory,--That
the Sun