The Republican journal., 1869-10-21
VOLUME 40.

drinks going into the lungs, there to unite with The
oxygen of the air, just it does in the stove OF
furnace, to make the animal heat
And here note two or three facts in which you
will find a great sermon. All fats contain very
large per cent of carbon; human fat lard bubber,
Nc, about so per cent; and Just III proportion as you
ascend from hot into cold regions, you find the fat
producing animals TO increase. To furnish this extra
80 per cent. Of carbon for forming the greatly in-
creased animal heat required by the greater cold
While the low carhonized food the rice and fruits
of the tropics is the main food where solar supplies
the need Of animal neat,in the cold zones God has
substituted for the loss of the solar correspond
! ingly increased animal heat, from the highly car
bonizcd fats and oils of the food in that region.
And from this viii be seen how absurd as well rs
harmful is the practice in all climes, when the heats
OF summer infame the body, OF heating it up still
more by those articles of food as fat fish and meat
50 largely composed of carbon, and SO of fire.
And right here comes in the utility Of cod-liver
oil in certain diseases, as consumption when III
those diseases the body fails TO get sufficient carbon
to yield the fuel that makes the animal heat, the
carbon that has been slowed away in the system is
drawn upon.-j,st as, rather than freeze, you Will
burn the chairs and tables when other fuel fails.
SO that in those complaints the body falls away"
because it is slowly burning itself up for fuel Now
as cod-yer oil contains about 50 per cent of fuel
carbon-it must be the best Of all things to furnish
that fuel and stop the waste of the body. Porter,
whiskey. &C., are given with precisely the same
object but the proportion of carbon in these is
y as 5 TO in the oil, and their value in that ratio.
Scarcely less valuable is carbon in nearly all the
arts and cmployments of life.
The soft dark substance of which " lead pencils
are made, called graphite plumbago, is com
pound Of carbon %, iron j parts in hundred and
does not contain particle of g Lead; that many
letter, even of the tender sort, is only charcoal.
Precious above gold and the richest Jewels is
steel; for without the arts and appliances of which
it is the mother, the world goes back to primcval
sayageness Yet steel is only cast iron retned both
being compound of "A large per cent. of iron, and
small per cent of carbon or charcoal. And
strange that so soft thing should make so hard
metal But remember, the hardest of all known
things is pure carbon-the diamond
Formerly the great difficulty in making good
the right amount of carbon had united with the
iron. Behold, now, the march Of knowledge. A
little instrument recently invented, called the spec
troscope to analyZc the solar rays, and which has
compelled not only the sun but the stars, thousands
of millions of miles away to say, by means of the
rays Of light they emit, what substances compose
their being; this little wondrous machine, telling
by the color of the carbon ray the exact amount of
it to be retained in the iron to make perfect steel
knowledge is the long-sought philosophers stone,
that changes the baser metals and ali things into
pure gold.