802 
PASSIONAL ZOOLOGY. 
sphere in which it moves, so as to conquer evil and to rise higher 
and higher in the scale of the universal hierarchy. And here is 
found precisely the mark of that profound separation which exists 
between man and the beast. The beast obeys his special attrac- 
tions from the first day. His instinct is inclosed within certain 
limits. Man, on the contrary, is urged by- eternal aspirations to- 
ward the ideal of perfectibility ; repose for him is death — it is an- 
nihilation. We ought not to exaggerate the horrors of a subver- 
sive creation, for this reason, that the creations of harmony remove 
from the surface of globes all the species rebellious to man (as we 
may already understand by the assistance which the dog and the 
horse have rendered to us) ; they complete the series of those whose 
concurrence is an indispensable condition of the integral develop- 
ment of his power and his happiness. God has made nothing 
useless. 
Perhaps man would never have aspired to the luxury of cleanli- 
ness and comfort without the stimulus of the flea, the louse, and 
other disgraces wdiich tyrannize over this tyrant of the earth. Thus 
is it said that the planet Saturn, who has endowed us with the flea, 
has given himself nearly as much trouble to perfect this ignoble 
parasitical insect as to create the horse, his most beautiful work 
and finest title to glory among us. 
What proves the extreme youth of the Earth besides, is the 
small number of ages elapsed between the phase of Edenism and 
that which we now traverse, sixty centuries at most. 
How Edenism is that period of the life of the planet which cor- 
responds to the first phase of the life of humanity. It opens on 
the very day of the birth of man. The first men are born adults, 
and the first women nubile. The painters who represent Adam 
and Eve with bodies made exactly like our own, and adorned Avith 
the umbilical cavity, are guilty of an anachronism and an ortho- 
graphical error. 
It is inconceivable that man, whose infancy is so long, could have 
defended himself against external dangers, had he been cast by his 
Author feeble and naked in the midst of the actual creation. Thus 
the planet mothers take great care that the appearance of their 
humanities shall coincide with a paradisaical era, amid which they 
