sensible as heat, and is ready as such to undertake
some different employment.

Coal is a mass of vegetable matter, which has
been buried in the earth for a considerable lapse
of time. It is solar light and heat put into a
savings-bank ages upon ages ago. It is power
and action from the sun, imprisoned in the
bowels of the earth. To us nineteenth
centurians falls the lucky task of making it our
slave, by setting it at liberty from its primeval
trammels. Throw a piece of coal or wood into
the fire; it is absolutely as if you took a small
quantity of sun-heat in your hand, to manipulate
it according to your requirements. And
this is not a mere form of speech; it is a
correct expression of the real fact.

When an animal exerts his strength, do you
also believe that he creates that strength? Not
more than the coal creates the steam-engine's
strength. Here again it is entirely derived from
the sun. The animal eats. What does he
consume to keep himself alive? Alimentary
substances, composed, in few words, of carbon,
oxygen, azote, and hydrogen.

In an animal organism, those elements
undergo a veritable transformation. Outside the
animal, before they were eaten, they were
combined, aggregated, united together, and in that
state constituted food. Inside the animal, they
are disunited, decomposed; the force which
held them together quits them, allows them to
separate, and so is free to do other work. It
causes the creature's body to grow; endows it
with vital and muscular force; and in short
produces all the phenomena of life.

Who created the aliment? The Sun—himself
created by the Great Maker of all things. Here
again, therefore, the life and strength possessed
by an animal are actually engendered by the
sun.

Throughout your whole existence you will
find, by following up the same reasoning, that
your most trifling act, your most thoughtless
movement, has derived its origin from the sun.
A blow with the fist, a breath, a sigh, can be
exactly estimated in rays of sunshine. Whether
you trifle or whether you work, to make such
an effort you have been obliged to expend so
much strength; and that strength had already
been stored in you by the sun, through the
agency of a series of transformations. Your
clothing is all borrowed from the sun. It is
he who has spun every thread of your linen, and
fed every fibre of your cloth and flannel. He
either bleaches it snowy white, or dyes it purple
and scarlet with indigo and madder. He
furnishes leather for useful service, and furs and
feathers for finery and parade. He gives you
your bedding; whether you repose luxuriously
between eider-down and wool, or stretch your
weary limbs on straw, chaff, Indian corn-husks,
seaweed, or even on a naked plank, as is the
lot of not a few, it is the sun who gives both
the one and the other. And what do we
receive from regions where the sun, as it were, is
not—from the immediate neighbourhood of either
pole? We receive just nothing. We cannot
even get to them. The absence of the sun bars
our progress with an impenetrable zone of ice
and snow.

In like manner, your fine cellars of hock,
burgundy, and claret, are nothing but bottled
sunshine from the banks of the Rhine, the slopes
of the Côte d'Or, and the pebbly plain of the
Medoc. Your butter and cheese are merely
solid forms of sunshine absorbed by the pastures
of Holland or Cambridgeshire. Your sugar is
crystallised sunshine from Jamaica. Your tea,
quinine, coffee, and spice, are embodiments of
solar influences shed on the surfaces of China,
Peru, and the Indian Archipelago. It is the
sun's action which sends you to sleep in opium,
poisons you in strychnine, and cures you in
decoctions of tonic herbs. You taste the sun in
your sauces, eat him in your meats, and drink
him even in your simplest beverage—water.
Without the sun, no blood could flow in your
veins; your whole corporeal vitality, your very
bodily life, is the result of the overflowings of
his bounty.

Nor is this all we owe to our great central
luminary. The physical forces with which we
are acquainted—heat, light, electricity,
magnetism, chemical affinity, and motion—dancing
their magic round and alternately assuming
each other's form and action, and now believed
in all probability to be one in their common
birth and origin—are direct emanations from the
sun.

But how grand and beautiful is the theory
that all material blessings here below come to
us entirely and alone from the sun! Its
simplicity and unity are completely consistent with
the attributes of one Supreme Omnipotent Being,
the Maker of the universe. Given motion, and
given matter, all the rest follows as an inevitable
consequence. All nature, from the simplest
fact to the most complex phenomenon, is
nothing but a work of destruction or reconstruction,
a displacement of force from one point to
another, according to laws which are absolutely
general. Nor is there materialism lurking in
the thought; for it is impossible to forget that,
if motion and matter form and transform organic
beings, there still needed a Creator to give the
impulse and the law. And, as to minor details,
the Hand of God is visible throughout the
universe.

The sun, then, is God's material instrument
on earth, as throughout the solar system. He
is the dispenser to us of our share of the
advantages allotted to us by the Great Benefactor. Of
all forms of worship, sun-worship is the most
excusable in nations unenlightened by Revelation.
Bending the knee to the god of day, in
the belief that the throne of the Almighty is
seated in the sun, is a far more elevated phase
of mistaken adoration than prostrating oneself
before an ugly image carved out of the stump of
a tree.

With this much said about might, let us now
look at the question of magnitude. From the
foregoing statements, it may easily be conceived
that the more an organised being is capable, in