IN A WORLD HALF AS LARGE. 687 



I have diminished him in other respects but not in intelligence, and 

 that I should have given him only a half, a quarter, or an eighth of 

 judgment. There would be no reason in this. I have received from 

 Biskra a uromastix — a kind of herbivorous lizard, with its tail 

 armed with points. Not having any Algerian plants to feed it, I 

 put it in a field where there were all kinds of wild flowers. The 

 animal found the flowers of the smartweed to its taste. Wishing 

 to vary its diet, and particularly to find something it would eat in 

 winter, I tried to feed it other things; but, though it was docile and 

 ate smartweed, fumitory flowers, and wood violets from the hand, 

 it showed a marked aversion or indifference to clover. One day, in 

 my impatience, not having found any smartweed, I opened its mouth 

 and forced in a clover blossom which it finally swallowed. The next 

 day, to my astonishment, having some clover blossoms in my hand, 

 the animal seized them and devoured them with evident greedy 

 pleasure. It recognized the plant it had been forced to swallow 

 and had found good, though it had despised it before. It had 

 got rid of a prejudice.- Would a rhinoceros have acted more 

 rationally? Who would have thought of its large size giving it more 

 intelligence? 



A very important conclusion results from our discussion. La- 

 place's law is true mechanically, within the strict limits in which it 

 is announced. But the psychical consequences Laplace draws from 

 it are fallacies, and the simplest phenomena of elasticity make the 

 fallacy evident. Yet if the law of universal attraction were all we 

 had by which to account for every kind of manifestations, psychical 

 as well as physical, or, in other words, if there were nothing in the 

 universe but material atoms situated at perceptible distances apart, 

 and attracting one another in proportion to their masses and in- 

 versely as the squares of their distances, Laplace's conclusion would 

 be impregnable; an observer could not perceive any diminution or 

 augmentation in the universe. But why? Because there would 

 be no longer an observer. As I have demonstrated, the moment 

 there is an observer, he will perceive a change; and if he perceives 

 it, it is undoubtedly because the faculty of observation escapes — with 

 others — the law of universal attraction; because it does not depend 

 solely upon the mass of the atoms and their distance. It is the same 

 with the ant and with the elephant. 



A final conclusion is that if all these deductions are exact, real 

 space is different from geometrical space, and the dimensions of the 

 universe are absolute. — Translated for the Popular Science Monthly 

 from del et Terre. 



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