“You need never call him Emidio in public. We call him so because, when we have been travelling about Italy alone together, we found it convenient to drop his title. But you know he is il Conte Gandolfi. His mother was the only child of a noble Roman family, and consequently a great heiress. She married a Neapolitan Conte Gandolfi; and that is how it happens that [pg 637] with a Neapolitan name his chief residence is in Rome, in the palazzo that belonged to his mother. His father was not a man of very considerable fortune, and his only property here is his villa at Capo di Monte, where he spends the summer. A nobler heart and a finer nature I never saw. There is the simplicity of a child, the honor of a true-born gentleman, the delicacy of a woman, the courage of a hero, and the piety of a saint.”
The tears stood in my eyes; and taking dear Frank's hand in mine, I said, “Thank you, dear old fellow, for saying that. And, thank God, you too have drawn a prize!”
A Discussion With An Infidel.
IV. Immortality Of Matter.
Reader. And now, doctor, what other argument do you allege against creation?
Büchner. The immortality of matter, and the immortality of force.
Reader. The immortality of matter?
Büchner. Yes, sir. “Matter is immortal, indestructible. There is not an atom in the universe which can be lost. We cannot, even in thought, remove or add an atom without admitting that the world would thereby be disturbed, and the laws of gravitation and the equilibrium of matter interfered with. It is the great merit of modern chemistry to have proved in the most convincing manner that the uninterrupted changes of matter which we daily witness, the origin and decay of organic and inorganic forms and tissues, do not arise, as was hitherto believed, from new materials, but that this change consists in nothing else but the constant and continuous metamorphosis of the same elementary principles, the quantity and quality of which ever are, and ever remain, the same” (p. 9). “The atoms are in themselves unchangeable and indestructible; to-day in this, tomorrow in another form, they present by the variety of their combinations the innumerable forms in which matter appears to our senses. The number of atoms in any element remains, on the whole, the same; not a single particle is formed anew; nor can it, when formed, disappear from existence” (p. 11).
Reader. Do you say in the same breath that no particle of matter can be formed anew, and that, when formed, it cannot disappear? When is it formed, if it cannot be formed at all?