3 88 MAN'S NE PLUS ULTRA. 



not affect the finest balance, is a world, with an equator and 

 poles of its own, and its central atom round which atomic 

 satellites gravitate. Whether these atoms are infinitely small 

 or infinitely great, whether the time of their revolutions is 

 measured by thousandths of a second or by myriads of years, 

 is of little importance so far as their gravitation (ponderation^ 

 or poising) is concerned. For this ponderation is absolutely 

 identical, whether we call it affinity^ when speaking of the 

 atomic movements of chemically decomposable matter; or 

 gravitation or attraction, when referring to those atoms of the 

 great whole which we call stars, and whose metamorphic scale 

 is far beyond the range of beings planted on the surface of 

 one of the stellar atoms. However profound may be the 

 researches of our astronomers, they will never attain to a 

 knowledge of the metamorphoses of worlds. The spectacle 

 of celestial spheres rising anew from their ashes, like "the 

 Arabian bird " of fable, will be as impossible for them as the 

 knowledge of the decompositions and recompositions of our 

 material bodies would be for chemists, planted on the surface 

 of an atom of carbon. How, from such a stand-point, could 

 they contemplate the manifold forms of matter, and embrace 

 at a glance all its changes? . . . Well, we are relatively as 

 powerless as these imaginary denizens of an atom of matter, 

 rooted as we are to the crust of a planet, a molecule sus- 

 pended in the eternal ocean. 



What shall we now say of the forms and movements of 

 living matter ? 



In the first place, that they are infinitely more varied and 



