# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1863_S235
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Materialism, or the So-Called Results of Modern Natural Science. 235

be brought forward in endless abundance. [!!] It will suffice to note that the wanderings and transformations which matter undergoes in the being of the universe, and which man has, in part, followed with scale and measure in hand, are to be reckoned in the millions upon millions, and that they are without goal or end. Dissolution and generation, decay and new formation join hands with one another everywhere, in an eternal chain. In the bread we eat, in the air we breathe, we draw to ourselves the matter that formed the bodies of our ancestors a thousand and again a thousand years ago; indeed we ourselves daily give off a part of our own matter to the outer world, perhaps to take in again, in a short time, that same matter, or the matter given off by our fellow living beings. Of the English one may say quite literally [!] that, as thanks for their forefathers who fell in the struggle for them and their freedom against French rule, they eat those forefathers up [the nasty English!] in their daily bread. The bones of the battlefield of Waterloo [only the English ones, of course, for to the French none owed any thanks,] have been brought to England in great quantity to manure the fields with, thereby doubling their yield. — This eternal and unstoppable circulation of the smallest particles of matter the learned man has called metabolism, [— Not at all. The learned man knows nothing of this kind of metabolism. The learned man calls metabolism only that process in organic bodies whereby organic matter that has become useless is replaced, in the living organism, by matter of the same or a similar nature. —] and the bold fancy of the British poet has traced the matter that once formed the body of great Caesar down to the point where it plugs a hole in a wall. How a fact so simple, and a truth so convincingly demonstrated by chemistry, can nowadays still be misjudged and overlooked by natural scientists and physicians appears scarcely conceivable, and proves how little, in general, the great discoveries of the natural sciences have yet broken a path for themselves into wider circles. [— A remarkable fate of these great discoveries of the natural sciences, that even famous natural scientists fail to recognize and overlook them! —] So speaks Schubert of the spontaneous origin of water in sudden cloud formations. Röbbelen holds that the animal organism generates nitrogen, and even the famous Ehrenberg seems to be in doubt as to whether organisms create the substances contained in them or merely transform them organically (see Zeise: Lectures on the Infinitude of the Great and the Small Material World, 1855, page 50), etc. How can one fail to recognize that out of nothing — nothing can arise? Matter must be present, even if previously in another form or combination, in order to produce any formation or take part in one. An atom of oxygen, of nitrogen, of iron, is everywhere and under all circumstances one and the same thing, endowed with the same properties immanent to it, and can never, in all eternity, become anything else