The various metals that we
ordinarily use are mostly found in a state of ore, and we do not
generally obtain them pure except by smelting. The air we breathe,
though not a compound, is a mixture. The water which is essential to our
life is a compound. And, if we pass from inorganic to organic
substances, all vegetables and animals are compound, sustained by
various articles of food which go to make up their frames. Now, how have
these compounds been formed? It is quite possible that some of them, or
all of them to some extent, may have been formed from the first. If
Science could go back to the beginning of all things, which it obviously
cannot, it might find the composition already accomplished, and be
compelled to start with it as a given fact--a fact as incapable of
scientific explanation as the existence of matter at all. But, on the
other hand, composition and decomposition is a matter of every-day
experience. Our very food could not nourish us except by passing through
these processes in our bodies; and by the same processes we prepare much
of our food before consuming it. May not Science go back to the time
when these processes had not yet begun? May not the starting-point of
the history of the universe be a condition in which the simple elements
were still uncombined? If Science could go back to the beginning of all
things, might we not find all the elements of material things ready
indeed for the action of the inherent forces which would presently unite
them in an infinite variety of combinations, but as yet still separate
from each other? Scattered through enormous regions of space, but drawn
together by the force of gravitation; their original heat, whatever it
may have been, increased by their mutual collision; made to act
chemically on one another by such increase or by subsequent decrease of
temperature; perpetually approaching nearer to the forms into which, by
the incessant action of the same forces, the present universe has grown;
these elements, and the working of the several laws of their own proper
nature, may be enough to account scientifically for all the phenomena
that we observe.
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