EVOLUTION AND MUTABILITY OF. MATTEli. 261 



eternal and immutable ; the celestial bodies are 

 eminently susceptible of evolution, slow indeed with 

 that we observe on the surface of our globe; but this 

 disproportion, corresponding to the immensity of 

 time and of cosmic spaces as compared with terres- 

 trial measurements, should not mislead us as to the 

 fundamental analogy of the phenomena. 



§ I. The Movement of Particles and Mole- 

 cules IN Brute Bodies. 



It is not only in celestial spaces that we must 

 search for that mobility of brute matter which imitates 

 the mobility of living matter. In order to find it we 

 have only to look about us, or to inquire from 

 physicists and chemists. 



As far as geologists are concerned, M. le Dantec 

 tells us somewhere of one who divided minerals into 

 living rocks — rocks capable of change of structure, of 

 evolution under the influence of atmospheric causes; 

 and dead rocks — rocks which, like clay, have found at 

 the end of all their changes a final state of repose. 

 Jerome Cardan, a celebrated scientist of the sixteenth 

 century, at once mathematician, naturalist, and 

 physician, declared not only that stones live, but 

 that they suffer from disease, grow old, and die. 

 The jewellers of*the present day use similar language 

 of certain precious stones; the torquoise, for example. 



The alchemists carried these ideas to an extreme. 

 It is not necessary here to recall the past, to evoke 

 the hermetic beliefs and the dreams of the alchemists, 

 who held that the different kinds of matter lived, 

 developed, and were transmuted into each other. 



