# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1863_S232
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

232

Materialism, or the So-Called Results of
Modern Natural Science.
(Continuation and Conclusion.)

We now turn to the proof offered us of the world's having had no beginning. Dr. Büchner continues thus: "It is the great merit of chemistry, in recent decades, to have taught us most clearly and unambiguously that the uninterrupted transformation of things which we see happening before us every day — the coming-to-be and passing-away of organic or inorganic forms and structures — does not rest on a coming-to-be and passing-away of matter that had not existed before, as was rather generally believed in earlier times; but rather that this transformation consists in nothing other than the constant and unceasing metamorphosis of these same elementary substances, whose quantity and quality remain in themselves always the same and unalterable for all time. With the aid of the balance one has followed matter along its manifold and intricate paths, and has everywhere seen it emerge again, in the same quantity, from whatever combination one had seen it enter. The calculations that have since been founded on this law have everywhere proved entirely correct. We burn a piece of wood, and it seems at first glance as though its constituents must have gone up in fire and smoke, been consumed. The chemist's balance, however, teaches that not only has nothing been lost of the weight of that wood, but that, on the contrary, it has been increased; it shows that the products caught and weighed contain, precisely, not only all those substances of which the wood had previously consisted — though in another form and composition — but that they also contain those substances which the constituents of the wood drew to themselves out of the air during combustion. In a word, the wood, in burning, has not diminished its weight but increased it. 'The carbon that was in the wood,' says Vogt, 'is imperishable; it is eternal and just as indestructible as the hydrogen and oxygen with which, in combination, it made up the wood. This combination, and the form in which it appeared, is destructible; matter, however, never.' 'The carbon that confronts us in a crystal of spar, in a wood fiber, or in a muscle, can, after the destruction of those bodies, take on a different shape in another grouping, but as an elementary substance it can never be changed, never annihilated.' (Czolbe.)"

We, to whom truth and genuine science are always desired and welcome, since through them we can only receive confirmation and strengthening of our faith in the God who reveals himself not only in Scripture but also in nature, are of course far removed from — the great merits which chemistry has earned for natural science