094 THE UNIVERSE. 



innumerable legions of gnomes, wliicli were scattered 

 throndi the bowels of the earth. The humble German 

 miner believed there were elves (Kobolds) hidden in every 

 nook and corner of the caverns, working silently and 

 spreading everywhere activity and life; pigmies of the 

 mountains dressed like miners, whose instinctive foresight 

 enabled them to forge metals, to heap up precious stones 

 in veins, and also to collect mysteriously in the darkness 

 those singular petrifactions Avhich were one day to reveal 

 to us unknown worlds. Although they loved him greatly, 

 these Kobolds fled before the approach of man. They 

 had been rarely seen, but every happy event in the ancient 

 mines was attributed to tliem.^ 



' Schleiden took a far bolder fliglit tlian Agricola had doue. The ohl miner- 

 alogist of Suabia had only described the genii of earth, Schleiden represented 

 them at work. In his work on Tlie Plant {La Plante) there is a beautiful en- 

 graving, representing little gnomes laborionsly occnpied iu la5"ing bare all the 

 riches of earth. Some hew the ri'ck iu order to withdraw large trunks of fossil- 

 ized trees ; others collect or solder together the torn fragments. Each gnome or 

 Kobold appears under the form of a little laborious and decrepit miner. The 

 back-ground of the picture is occupied by a cascade which bounds and foams 

 among the rocks. — Schleiden, La I^latitc, \A. 13. 



