THE WORLD OF THE UNSEEN. 
81 
ment wherein this impalpable—I had almost said invisible—organism 
has interred the remains of its vanished race. 
A bygone world, hidden beneath the present and upper world in 
the profundities of life or the obscurity of time ! 
What might it not tell us, if God would give it speech, and permit 
it to recall all that it has done or is doing for us ! What just demands 
might not the elementary plants, the imperfect animals whose dust has 
fashioned for our use the fertile crust of the globe, that noble theatre of 
life, address to us ! “ While you were still asleep,” might say the ferns, 
“ we alone, by transforming and purifying the previously irrespirable 
air, created after thousands upon thousands of years the earth now 
blooming with the corn and the rose! We accumulated that subter¬ 
ranean treasure of enormous coal-beds which warms your hearth; and 
that one mass, among others, a hundred leagues in length, which feeds 
the great forge of the world from London to Newcastle.” 
“ We,” the imperceptibles might say,—the obscure and unnamed 
animalcules despised or ignored by man,—“ we are thy guardians, have 
laid out thy fields, and built thy dwelling-places. It is not the great 
fossil rhinoceros or mastodon whose bones have made thy soil; it is 
our work—or rather, it is ourselves. Thy cities, thy Louvres, and thy 
Capitols are constructed with our debris. Life itself in its essence, in 
that sparkling beverage by which France diffuses joy over all the earth, 
whence comes it ? From arid hills where the vine thrives in the white 
dust that once was ive, and absorbs the concealed warmth of our prior 
existences.” 
The demand made upon us would be a lengthened one; restitution 
impossible. These dead myriads, having nourished with their lime the 
various articles that form our sustenance, have passed into our very 
being. Others also would put forth a claim. The very pebble, the 
hard flint, once lived, and now nourishes life. 
Great was the astonishment in Europe when a Berlin professor— 
Ehrenberg—informed us that the silicious stone, so sharp, rough, and 
brittle, the tripoli with which metals are polished, is neither more 
nor less than an aggregation of dead animalcules, an accumulation of 
the shells of infusoria of a terrible diminutiveness. So small is the 
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