§2 WORKERS STILL AT WORK. 
creature I speak of, that 1t takes one hun. 
dred and eighty-seven millions to weigh a 
grain. 
The labours of the unseen architects 
of the globe, admired by our men of science 
in extinct species, travellers have dis- 
covered revived in living species. They 
have surprised, in our own day, immense 
laboratories in permanent activity, of 
beings invisible in themselves, or appar- 
ently powerless, but really of boundless 
capacity of toil, if we judge by its results. 
What death accomplishes for life, life itself 
relates. Numbers of tiny organisms be- 
come by their present works the interpre- 
ters and historians of their vanished pre- 
decessors. 
These, like the latter, with their struc- 
tures, or their débris, build up islands in 
the sea, and construct immense banks of 
reefs, which, gradually joining together, 
will become new lands. Without going 
further than Sicily, we find among the 
madrepores, that cover its coasts torn by 
voleanic fires, a little animal, the zoophyte, 
which has accomplished a task man would 
never have dared to undertake. He con- 
trives to move forward by protecting his 
soft body with a shield of stone which 
he incessantly secretes. Continuously de- 
veloping the tubes which in succession 
afford him shelter, he entirely fills up the 
empty spaces left by the madrepores or 
corals, bridges over the intervals between the reefs, and connects them 
with one another; finally, he creates a passage in defiles previously 
