John William Draper

“ And though it is thus the arch-chemist, the Sun, who transmutes a poisonous gas in the air into fruits, and seeds, and flowers; who prepares the vital medium that we breathe, and enables us, therefore, to think and move, shall we not look with veneration, through his more obvious agency, to a silent influence that is beyond? ”

“ In vain the physiologist asks me to deny the combustive influence of air in the body, and affects a fictitious fear of the tendencies of such a doctrine. Shall I not believe the positive declaration of him who is the artificer of these beautiful contrivances?—shall we accuse the Almighty of materialism when he tells us that "he breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul?"
The circumstances that first direct the mind of a philosopher to discoveries destined to exert an influence over the whole human race cannot fail to be full of interest. ”

“ The book of Nature! shall not we chemists, and all our brother-students, whether they be naturalists, astronomers, mathematicians, geologists, shall we not all humbly and earnestly read it? Nature, the mother of us all, has inscribed her unfading, her eternal record on the canopy of the skies, she has put it all around us on the platform of the earth! No man can tamper with it, no man can interpolate or falsify it for his own ends. She does not command us what to do, nor order us what to think. ”

“ Though I have spared no pains in the composition of this book, I am very sensible how unequal it is to the subject, to do justice to which a knowledge of science, history, theology, politics, is required; every page should be alive with intelligence and glistening with facts. But then I have remembered that this is only as it were the preface, or forerunner, of a body of literature, which the events and wants of our times will call forth. We have come to the brink of a great intellectual change. ”

“ Thus, with what pleasure the whole animal world rejoices at the coming of spring! There is a heart-felt delight, not limited to the higher races, but common to all. With the returning temperature, birds, and beasts, and insects, prepare for the duties of a new year, and every thing seems full of animation and life. Even the illiterate man cannot look unmoved on the green tint stealing over the fields. ”

“ His discovery of oxygen gas will last as long as the world endures.
From the life of this remarkable man we may draw a lesson, a lesson which the highest authority, with brief emphasis, has given us—"Study to be quiet, and mind your own business." We here see a great man effecting his own shipwreck on the shoals of politics and controversial theology. To what an eminence might Priestley have attained, if he had limited himself to those objects for which Providence had so well fitted him, and abandoned the vain pursuits in which he delighted, to men of less intellect and force! ”

“ I would not say one word in disparagement of gifts to colleges and universities, for it is indeed a noble purpose; but endowments for the promotion of a knowledge of Nature conferred on scientific societies for the good of all men, no matter what their country or color, no matter what their religious profession or political condition, are still nobler. The one is a local and transitory benefaction, the other an enduring and universal benevolence.
In our own special science, chemistry, all that has been done has only served to extend the boundary of what remains. ”

“ Priestley soon found that oxygen—I give it the name under which it has subsequently passed—was absolutely essential, in all cases then known, to the support of flame and fire, and that animal life depended on it; that a man, by breathing in a limited space, would soon exhaust it of so much of this gas that suffocation would ensue; that the atmosphere, in reality, is a reservoir of it, from which every thing possessing the attributes of an animal abstracts it. ”

“ May not every one of them have special elements of its own? Is not each a chemical laboratory in itself? Look at the cluster in the sword-handle of Perseus; in Cassiopeia, a universe of stars on a ground of star-dust; in Hercules—of which, as astronomers say, no one can look at for the first time through a great telescope without a shout of wonder—the most superb spectacle that the eye of man can witness! ”

“ Those who are familiar with the details of these things will recognize it as the epoch which parts off a blank solitude on one side, broken by the rude beginnings of low animal life, from that later period, on the other, which is adorned by all the beautiful contrivances of animated Nature, and crowned by the presence of man. The laws of Nature have ever from the beginning been such as they are now. We are fully able to trace the clear relationship between the condition of living things on the surface of the earth and the constitution of the atmosphere ”

“ The two divisions of the world of organization reacting on each other through the medium of the atmosphere—the living against the lifeless, the moving against the motionless; and not only thus influencing each other through that medium, but maintaining its properties forever unimpaired, and ready for action. It is the glory of astronomy to have proved that the planetary orbs, which circle round the sun, under the influences of a pair of forces thus reacting, can retain their movements undisturbed through a coming eternity. ”

“ In the Medicean gardens the lovers of Plato assembled to restore, under an Italian sky, the philosophy that had been extinguished in Athens, and to commemorate by a symposium the birthday of that illustrious man. There is a pleasure in associating with those whose thoughts are congenial to our own, in breathing an atmosphere in which the intellectual makes itself felt. ”

“ But what is not possible to man is possible to God; and I think it will always elicit from a reflecting mind a tribute of veneration, to know that this great and intricate machine of the universe, with all the millions of beings, living and inanimate, that compose it, with all their affections, attributes, and relations, are sustained and governed according to the original and unvarying intention of their changeless Author; that from the beginning of things, as respects its physical condition, there never has arisen occasion for retouching a work perfect in itself from the first. ”

“ How can they read without blushing at their own conduct such declarations as that recently uttered by the great organ of English opinion, the foremost of English journals? The Times, which no one will accuse of partiality in this instance, says: "In the natural distribution of subjects, the history of enterprise, discovery, and conquest, and the growth of republics, fell to America, and she has dealt nobly with them. In the wider and multifarious provinces of art and science she runs neck and neck with the mother-country, and is never left behind!" ”

“ Many of the Greek philosophers looked upon the Olympian Jupiter as only an emblem of the atmosphere, and little suspected that the day would come when that great god of antiquity would be anatomized, dissected, and his various parts and qualities displayed. How often do things which have struck one generation with awe become commonplace affairs in another! ”

“ The material atmosphere once had a poisonous constitution, the social atmosphere has its poisons too. There is a cry, almost of despair, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, from the Black to the Atlantic Seas. It is no imaginary nightmare that is oppressing men, but so greatly has the human mind been developed by the advance of knowledge, that it has outgrown the existing order of things. The pressure of that invisible social atmosphere has become too intolerable to be borne ”

“ Whatever there is that is in harmony with facts now happening here, is to us an unimpeachable evidence that the laws which were governing in those old ages have undergone no depreciation, but are active as ever until now. Then shall I exaggerate if I say that those laws are eternal in duration?
Infinite in influence, eternal in duration, what a magnificent spectacle! In the resistless energy of the motions of the universe is there not omnipotence? ”

“ Some seek for pleasure in the mere gratification of animal appetites, let us rather find it in the exercise of the intellect; and, when spring approaches, let us rejoice in the change, not so much because there is a promise of food, though we should never forget that all these vegetable products, of which so many are destined to delight our tastes, were mortal poisons while they were yet in the air, but chiefly because they are indications that all that is necessary for us as thinking beings is accomplishing. ”

“ When carbon burns, it is merely uniting with atmospheric oxygen, and the resulting carbonic acid escapes away under an invisible form. So, too, when a man breathes, he draws in oxygen from the air; it is distributed to all parts of his system, and, combining therein with carbon, turns into carbonic acid, which is expelled when he throws out his breath. Every animal, therefore, to use the language of chemistry, is an oxidizing machine, the physical end of its existence being to rob the air of oxygen, and put back, in its stead, carbonic-acid gas. ”

“ Two thousand years ago the pagans peopled Olympus with many gods; and so in the infancy of medicine the corporeal frame was peopled with many intangible forms—a soul, a mind, a vital power, an instinct, a nervous agent, an aura, and animal spirits without end. But a better knowledge of these things is fast teaching us the eternal truth that, as there is but one God in the heavens, so there is but one spirit in man; a presiding agent that supervises and directs all; that all the acts of life are brought about by the inhalation of atmospheric air ”

“ I have told you that the continuance of the life of man is indissolubly linked with the putting forth of the buds of trees. Let the one fail, and the other will speedily stop. Nay, more; as all our intellectual acts can only go on as a consequence of respiration, and the respiration, too, of such an atmosphere as that of our earth, we perceive that our highest endowments are thus connected with things at first sight apparently, having no connection with them. ”

“ I recall what we all witness as respects the social condition of man, that, according as he advances in intellect, he lives under self-imposed rules, and that his reverence for law is the measure of his civilization; that it is the pride of that civilization to put in the place of an autocrat, dispensing instant rewards and punishments with his own hands, the ideal majesty of the law, which deals out inflexible justice to the good and evil, and makes no distinction of persons ”

“ It is a constant putting of words for things, of phrases for facts. Even in the hands of the most powerful writers, metaphysical physiology is essentially unintelligible; but not so with that other physiology which has arisen in our times, all its statements are clear, precise, distinct; it relies on the exact sciences, such as chemistry and natural philosophy, because it is itself exact. The progress of all the departments of human knowledge is often the same. ”

“ In imagination we might mark off groups in the two kingdoms which are the fanciful representations or counterparts of each other. Perhaps we men, who have to resist the storms of life, may have our representatives in the rugged trees of the forest; the ladies will certainly find their antagonists among roses and other flowers.
From what has been said, you will have gathered how important is the part which oxygen plays in the scheme of Nature. To it is committed the duty of destroying all animal races, and transferring the parts of which their bodies are composed to plants. ”

“ The tranquillity of society depends so much on the stability of its religious convictions, that no one can be justified in wantonly disturbing them. But faith is in its nature unchangeable, stationary; Science is in its nature progressive; and eventually a divergence between them, impossible to conceal, must take place. It then becomes the duty of those whose lives have made them familiar with both modes of thought, to present modestly, but firmly, their views ”

“ The sunbeam—the finger of God—that reaches across the unknown abysses of the universe in a moment, bringing life out of death, and clothing the objects around us with their many-colored dyes, has extracted this condition of everlasting permanence from a preëxisting transient order of things. ”

“ Shall a man who stands forth to vindicate the majesty of such laws be blamable in your sight? Rather shall you not with him be overwhelmed with a conception so stupendous? And yet let us not forget that these eternal laws of Nature are only the passing thoughts of God. ”

“ Is there not something profoundly impressive in this, that the human mind can look from without upon itself, as one looks at his phantom image in a mirror, and discern its own lineaments and admire its own movements? My own thoughts have of late years been forcibly drawn to this, from a recognition that the interpretation by the mind of impressions from without takes place under mathematical laws, as, for instance, that when external ethereal vibrations create in the mind a certain idea, that same idea will arise when the vibrations are doubled, or tripled, or quadrupled in frequency ”

“ Of his double nervous system, one part, the intellectual, observes its mysterious periodicities, its time of activity and time of repose, its time of wakefulness and time of sleep; the other never sleeps till death, but keeps up its incessant action; the beating of the heart, the introduction of air by breathing, involving millions of movements which never fatigue us, and of which we are indeed, for the most part, unconscious. ”

“ So, therefore, we see that that relation which now exists between animals and plants, and the atmosphere, is an affair that has sprung out of a prior order of things—that there was a time when the constitution of the air was utterly unfit for the support of animal life; that a purification took place through the action of the rays of the sun; and the deposit of coal marks out the great epoch when life of a high order, among air-breathing animals, became a possibility. ”