"I knew a maple-tree which was dying on the ruins of an old wall, a few feet from good, rich soil in a ditch, and which in despair threw out a venturesome root, reached the coveted soil, buried itself there, and gained a solid footing, so that by degrees, although a motionless thing, it changed its place, let its original roots die, left the stones, and lived resuscitated upon the organ that had set it free. I have known elms which were going to eat up the soil of a fertile field, whose food had been cut off from them by a wide ditch, and who therefore determined to make their uncut roots pass under the ditch. They succeeded, and returned to their regular food, much to the cultivator's astonishment. I knew an heroic jasmine which went eight times through holes in a board which kept the light away from it, and which a teasing observer would put back into the shade, hoping at last to wear out the flower's energy; but he did not succeed.

"A plant breathes, drinks, eats, selects, refuses, seeks, works, lives, acts according to its instincts. One does 'like a charm,' another pines, a third is nervous and agitated. The sensitive-plant shivers and droops its leaves at the slightest touch. In certain hours of well-being the calla lily is warm, the pink is phosphorescent, the valisneria goes down to the bottom of the lake to ripen the fruit of her loves. In these manifestations of an unknown life the philosopher cannot help recognizing a song from the universal choir in the plant world.

"I go no further for the human soul just now, although it is incomparably superior to the soul of a plant, and although it has created an intellectual world as much above the rest of the terrestrial world as the stars are higher than the Earth. I am not looking at it now from the point of view of its spiritual faculties, but only as force animating the human being.

"Ah! I wonder that that force can group the atoms that we breathe, or that we assimilate by nutrition and form this charming being! Think of that young girl the day she was born, and follow in thought the gradual development of that little body through the years of her awkward age to the first graces of youth and the charms of womanhood. How is human organism nourished, developed, and composed? You know,—by respiration and nutrition.

"The air supplies three quarters of our nourishment by respiration. The oxygen in the air maintains the fire of life, and the body is comparable to a flame, constantly renewed by the principles of combustion. The lack of oxygen extinguishes life as it extinguishes a lamp. By respiration the black venous blood is transformed into red arterial blood and regenerated. The lungs are a fine tissue pierced with from forty to fifty millions of little holes, which are just too small for the blood to filter through, and just large enough for the air to penetrate them. A perpetual interchange of gas takes place between the air and the blood, the first furnishing the second with oxygen, the second eliminating carbonic acid. On the one hand the atmospheric oxygen burns carbon in the lung; on the other the lung exhales carbonic acid, nitrogen, and water in the form of vapor. In the daytime, plants breathe by an opposite process,—they absorb carbonic acid and exhale oxygen; by this difference maintaining one part of the general equilibrium of terrestrial life. "Of what is the human body composed? An average adult man weighs 70 kilograms. Of this amount there are nearly 52 kilograms of water in the blood and flesh. Analyze the substance of our body, you will find albumen, fibrine, caseine, and gelatine; that is, organic substances composed originally of the four essential gases,—oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, and carbonic acid. You will also find substances with no nitrogen, such as gum, sugar, starch, and fat. These matters likewise pass through our organism; their carbon and hydrogen are consumed by the oxygen breathed in during respiration, and then exhaled under the form of carbonic acid and water.

"You are not unaware that water is a combination of two gases, oxygen and hydrogen; the air is a mixture of two gases, oxygen and nitrogen, to which are added in lesser proportions water in the form of vapor, which, however, is but condensed oxygen, etc.

"Thus our body is composed only of transformed gases."

"But," interrupted my companion, "we do not live solely upon the air; at certain hours, indicated by our stomachs, it is very necessary to add some supplies which are not without a value of their own,—such as a pheasant's wing, a filet de sole, a glass of ChÂteau Laffitte or champagne, or, as your taste may prefer, asparagus, grapes, peaches...."

"Yes, that all passes through our organism and renews its tissues,—pretty rapidly too; for in a few months (not in seven years, as was formerly thought) our body is entirely renewed. To return to that lovely being who posed before us just now. None of that flesh which we admired existed three or four months ago; those shoulders, that face, those eyes, that mouth, those arms, that hair, and, even to the very nails, all that organism, is but a current of molecules, a ceaselessly renewed flame, a river which we may look at all our lives, but never see the same water again. Now, all that is but assimilated gas, condensed and modified, and more than anything else, it is air. These bones themselves, so solid now, were formed and hardened gradually. Do not forget that our whole body is composed of invisible molecules which do not touch each other, and which are continually renewed. "Finally, our table is spread with vegetables and fruits; if we are vegetarians we absorb substances almost entirely drawn from the air. This peach is air and water; this pear, this grape, this almond are also made of air and water, a few gaseous elements drawn to them by the sap, by solar heat, by the rain. Asparagus or salad, peas or beans, lettuce or chicory, all these live in the air and on the air; what the earth furnishes, what the sap seeks out, are also gases, and the very same nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, etc.

"If it is a question of beefsteak, chicken, or some other 'meat,' the difference is not very great. Sheep and oxen feed upon grass. If we relish a partridge cooked with cauliflower, a roasted quail, a truffled turkey, or a stewed hare, all these substances, apparently so different, are only transformed vegetable matter, which itself is but a grouping of molecules taken from the gases of which we have just been speaking,—air, water, elements, molecules, and atoms almost imponderable of themselves, and moreover absolutely invisible to the naked eye.

"Thus, whatever may be our kind of nourishment, our body, kept repaired, developed by the absorption of molecules acquired by respiration and alimentation, is really but a current incessantly renewed by means of this assimilation,—directed, governed, and organized by the immaterial force which animates us. To this force we may assuredly give the name of 'soul.' It groups the atoms which suit it, eliminates those which are useless to it, and, starting with an imperceptible speck, an indiscernible germ, ends by building up the Apollo Belvidere or the Venus of the Capitol. Phidias is but a coarse imitator, compared to this hidden and mysterious force. Mythology tells us that Pygmalion became the lover of a statue of his own creation. Not so! Pygmalion, Praxiteles, Michael Angelo, Benvenuto, and Canova created nothing but statues. The force that can construct the living body of man and woman is more sublime.

"But this force is immaterial, invisible, intangible, imponderable, like the attraction which lulls the worlds in the universal melody; and the body, however material it may seem to us, is in itself only a harmonious grouping, formed by the attraction of this interior force. So you see that I confine myself strictly within the limits of positive science in speaking of this young girl by the title of a soul clothed with air,—like you or me, for instance, neither more nor less.

"From the origin of humanity down to within a century or two, it has been believed that sensation was perceived at the very point where it was felt. A pain felt in the finger was considered as having its seat in the finger itself. Children and many people believe so still. Physiology has demonstrated that the impression is transmitted from the finger-tip to the brain by means of the nervous system. If the nerve is cut, the finger may be burned with impunity; the paralysis is complete. We have been able to determine the time taken by the impression in transmitting itself from any part of the body to the brain, and it is known that the rapidity of this transmission is about twenty-eight metres per second. Since then we have referred sensation to the brain. But we have stopped half way.

"The brain is matter, like the finger, and by no means fixed and stable matter. It is essentially changing matter, rapidly variable, and forming no identity. A single lobe, a single cell, a single molecule which does not change, does not and could not exist in the whole mass of encephalic matter. A stoppage of motion, of circulation, or of transformation would be a death-warrant. The brain subsists and feels, only on condition of submitting, like all the rest of the body, to the incessant transformations of organic matter which constitute the vital circuit.

"So it cannot be that our personality, our identity, lies in a certain grouping of cerebral matter,—our individual me, our ego which acquires and preserves a personal scientific and moral value, increasing with study; our ego which feels itself responsible for its acts performed a month, a year, ten, twenty, fifty years ago, during which time however the molecular grouping has been changed frequently.

"Physiologists who affirm that the soul does not exist, are like their ancestors who affirmed that they felt pain in their finger or their foot. They are a little less far from the truth, but they stop on the way when they stop at the brain, and make the human being consist of cerebral impressions. This hypothesis is all the less excusable because these same physiologists know perfectly well that personal sensation is always accompanied by a modification of substance. In other words, the ego of the individual only continues when the identity of its matter ceases to continue.

"Our principle of sensibility, then, cannot be a material object; it is put in communication with the universe by cerebral impressions, by the chemical forces disengaged in the encephalon in consequence of material combinations. But it is different.

"And our organic constitution is perpetually transformed under the direction of a psychic principle.

"Some molecule now incorporated in our organism escapes from it by expiration, perspiration, etc., to belong to the atmosphere for a longer or shorter time, then to be incorporated into another organism,—plant, animal, or man. The molecules which actually constitute your body were not all made part of your person yesterday, and none of them were there three months ago. Where were they? Either in the air or in another body. All the molecules now forming your organic tissues, your lungs, your eyes, your brain, your legs, etc., have already served to form other organic tissues. We are all resuscitated dead men, made from the dust of our ancestors. If all the people who have lived up to this time arose from the dead, there would be five of them to every square foot upon the surface of all the continents,—obliged to climb on one another's shoulders in order to stand; but they could not all be completely resuscitated, for many of the molecules have served successively for several bodies.

"Our own organisms likewise, resolved into their ultimate particles, will help to form the bodies of our descendants.

"Each molecule of air then goes on eternally from life to life, and escapes thence from death to death, by turns wind, wave, earth, animal, or flower. It is incorporated successively into the substance of numberless organisms. The air, the inexhaustible source whence everything that lives takes its breath, is yet an immense reservoir into which everything that dies pours its last sigh; by its absorption, vegetable and animal, different organisms come to life and afterwards perish. Life and death are both in the air we breathe, and perpetually succeed each other by the exchange of gaseous molecules; the molecule of oxygen which this old oak exhales will fly away to the lungs of a child in its cradle. The last sighs of a man will weave the brilliant corolla of a flower, or expand like a smile over the verdant meadow. And thus by an infinite series of partial deaths, the atmosphere incessantly nourishes the universal life spread over the surface of the world.

"And if nevertheless some objection should still remain unanswered, I would go further, and add that our clothes as well as our bodies are composed of substances which at first were all gaseous. Take this thread, draw it out: what a resistance! How many webs of cambric, silk, linen, cotton, and wool industry have been formed by the help of these warps and woofs! And yet, what is a thread of linen, flax, or cotton? Globules of air in juxtaposition which are held together only by their molecular force. What is a thread of silk or wool? Another set of molecules in juxtaposition. Admit, then, that our clothes as well are air, gas, substances drawn in the beginning from the atmosphere,—oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, vapor of water, etc."

"I am glad to see," said the painter, "that art is not so far from science as is supposed in certain circles. If your theory is purely scientific to you, to me it is art, and of the best. Besides, do all these distinctions exist in Nature? In Nature there is neither art nor painting nor sculpture, music nor decoration, philosophy nor chemistry, nor astronomy nor meteorology. Look at the sky, the sea, those foot-hills of the Alps, those rosy evening clouds, those luminous perspectives towards the Italian coast,—all that is one. There is unity in everything. And since molecular philosophy demonstrates that there is no longer any body, that even the atoms in a bar of steel or platinum do not touch each other, no one will be the loser, provided our souls are left us."

"Yes, it is a fact against which no prejudice can prevail,—living beings are souls clothed with air. I pity the worlds deprived of their atmosphere."

We had returned to the seashore after a long ramble not far from our point of departure, and were passing the battlemented wall of a villa on our way from Beaulieu to Cape Ferrat, when two very fashionably dressed ladies passed us. They were the Duchess of V—— and her daughter, whom we had met the previous Thursday at a ball at the PrÉfecture. We bowed to them, and disappeared under the olive-trees. The young girl, inquisitive daughter of Eve, turned to look after us, and it seemed to me that a sudden blush crimsoned her cheeks; it was doubtless the reflection of the setting sun's rays.