580 THE UNIVERSE. 



Such are the grand scenes of the temporary creations 

 which successively lent life to the earth, and during each 

 of which the sublime essence of life seems to be constantly 

 progressing over matter till it reaches our species, the gen- 

 ius of which appears the highest reflection of the divinity. 



But it is in this intellectual supremacy that man inevi- 

 tably finds the source of the doubts which overwhelm him. 

 His life is exhausted in vainly attempting to efface the past 

 and fathom the future. His thoughts, uncertain and inquis- 

 itive, sweep him along like an impetuous river which loses 

 itself in a boundless ocean : like the favorite heroes of 

 Goethe and Byron, all his efforts are directed towards un- 

 ravelling the impenetrable shadows of his destiny. Hence, 



" In New Guinea the Papuans also build on piles, but these are sunk in the sea 

 at a certain distance from the shore, and parallel with it. They support, at a 

 height of eight or ten feet above the water, a flooring formed of round pieces of 

 wood, which in its turn supports circular or square cabins, formed of stakes placed 

 near each other, and of interlaced rushes, and covered by conical or two-fronted 

 roofs. One or two narrow bridges lead to the shore. 



" Except in the difference between a lacustrine and maritime site, the habita- 

 tions of these Poeonians on Lake Prasias, whom Megabyzus could not subdue, were 

 exactly similar." (Herodotus, book v., cap. 16.) 



" The settlements of those Africans whose aquatic city, built in a creek of the 

 river Tsadda, caused so much astonishment, some ten years ago, to Dr. Baikie, the 

 English naturalist, then a member of the expedition in the Pleiad on the Niger, 

 are also constructed quite on the same plan. 



" On the approach of strangers the inhabitants issued from their abodes, the 

 water being up to their knees. One child was up to the waist. 4 We saw some 

 of these huts,' says the doctor, 'which the inhabitants, if they be inhabited, could 

 only enter or leave by diving like beavers. We could not have imagined,' he 

 adds, * reasonable creatures forming, as it were from taste, a colony of beavers, 

 having the manners of the hippopotami and crocodiles which infest the neighbor- 

 ing marshes.' " Victor Meunier, La Science et les Savants en 1864, Paris, 1865, 

 p. 86. 



