44 THE WORLD MACHINE 



instead of his Brobdingnagian giants, let the imagination soar 

 a little. 



In his rather imitative tale of Micromegas, the nimble pen 

 of Voltaire has sketched a traveller from a vast planet which 

 is satellite to Sirius, and who on our dwarfish world skips lightly 

 over the mountains and across the seas, as a goat from crag to 

 crag. We may take a yet wider range. 



Upon some clear moonless night, scintillant with the crowd 

 of flaming stars, let your vagrant fancy roam the ways of space, 

 there to picture, if you will, some gigantesque voyager from 

 another realm than our own, distantly watching from the rail 

 of his uncharted vessel the ceaseless turning of the silent earth. 

 Directing his helmsman to parallel its course, he notes, as it 

 turns and turns, here and there upon wide wastes which, from 

 the brilliant reflection of their surface, he may conjecture to be 

 oceans, faint specks. These, as he directs his glass to study 

 them, seem to trail a thin blackish ribbon behind them. As 

 with each successive turn of the earth they come again in view, 

 he perceives that they have advanced a little toward one side 

 or another of the mirror-like surfaces, finally to merge them- 

 selves in the dark patches which he may take to be land. 



Puzzled at the capricious course of these moving specks, 

 which, though regular in their motion, seem governed by no 

 law, he signals the man at the wheel to draw nearer. Again 

 searching with his glass, these specks take on the appearance 

 of drawn-out egg-shells, and he finds that the trailing ribbon 

 is a band of smoke. Though swiftly whirled from his view, 

 he can yet determine that whichever way they go they pursue 

 a fixed direction ; failing to observe any means of propulsion, 

 he must nevertheless infer that they have inside some pro- 

 pelling mechanism, and are in some way steered. 



Curious and delighted at the thought of an intricate 

 mechanism so marvellously small, he approaches his vessel as 

 nearly as he dares to this rapidly turning ball, to follow whose 

 flight through space he finds it needful to stoke his own engines 

 smartly to keep up. With what excited pulses, with what 

 genuine awe, does he perceive, in the brief moments that he 

 can hold them in sight, that the decks of these trailing egg- 

 shells are covered with other moving specks ; gradually he 

 makes out that they are slender midgets, scarce larger to his 

 eyes than the harvest mites that we may feel, but hardly see, 



