This is but a hint of the mutability of created things. Marble,
sea-shells, the chalk-cliffs of Dover, the limestone fossils which
preserve for us animal forms of species long since extinct, the coral
formations that are stretching out in dangerous reefs in so many seas
of the tropics, are all identical in their chief ingredient, and, as
we see, are by natural processes and various accidents constantly
interchanging their positions.

It ought to be consoling to those who think a great deal of their
bodies, to reflect, that, if we may tend "to base uses," we may also
tend to very noble ones. In the course of their transmigrations, the
elements of a worthless individual may get into far better company than
they have before enjoyed,--may enter into brains that immortalize their
owner and redeem the errors of the old possessor. Whoever bases his
merit on a long line of ancestors who have nothing but a perpetuated
name to boast of, may be likened to the last of many successive tenants
of a house who have hired it for their temporary uses. The inheritance
of a brave spirit and a noble mind is a sufficient justification for a
reasonable pride; but not so with the heritage of materials which are
continually interchanging with the clod.

There need be nothing humiliating in such thoughts; the operations
of Nature are always admirable. But when the relics of humanity are
deliberately appropriated to such mechanical or scientific purposes
as we shall relate, before they have entirely lost their original (we
should say latest) form, then most men would look upon the act as
in some sort a desecration. With what holy horror would the ancient
Egyptians regard the economical uses to which their embalmed bodies were
appropriated a few centuries ago! In the words of Ambrose Paré, the
great surgeon of five French kings in the sixteenth century, is a full