CHAPTER XXIII.
BY "TASMA."
Our nineteenth century, as we are all aware, is nothing if not analytical. Chemists spend days and nights in examining into the properties of some apparently unimportant compound, and do not abandon their task until they have, ascertained the exact proportions in which primal gases are blended in its composition. In the same way, men of science, dissectors of motives, and these curious lay-preachers, the French novelists, take some complicated sentiment of the human heart and twist it round, and turn it inside out, and expend themselves in efforts to trace it back to its origin through the influences of heredity or idiosyncrasy, or a predominance of white or red globules in the blood. Their researches are not always as fertile in results as those of the chemists, for in every human organization there enters an unknown quantity which upsets the calculations of all the physiologists and psychologists combined. Nevertheless, they carry on their labors undaunted, and it may be said of them, as of the alchemists of old, that if they do not find
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