ith insects, will sometimes check
our breathing so that we aspire for cleaner places. But none is clean:
the moving sand is infected with lice; the pure spring, where it bursts
out of the mountain, is a mere issue of worms; even in the hard rock the
crystal is forming.

In two main shapes this eruption covers the countenance of the earth:
the animal and the vegetable: one in some degree the inversion of the
other: the second rooted to the spot; the first coming detached out of
its natal mud, and scurrying abroad with the myriad feet of insects or
towering into the heavens on the wings of birds: a thing so
inconceivable that, if it be well considered, the heart stops. To what
passes with the anchored vermin, we have little clue: doubtless they
have their joys and sorrows, their delights and killing agonies: it
appears not how. But of the locomotory, to which we ourselves belong, we
can tell more. These share with us a thousand miracles: the miracles of
sight, of hearing, of the projection of sound, things that bridge space;
the miracles of memory and reason, by which the present is conceived,
and, when it is gone, its image kept living in the brains of man and
brute; the miracle of reproduction, with its imperious desires and
staggering consequences. And to put the last touch upon this mountain
mass of the revolting and the inconceivable, all these prey upon each
other, lives tearing other lives in pieces, cramming them inside
themselves, and by that summary process, growing fat: the vegetarian,
the whale, perhaps the tree, not less than the lion of the desert; for
the vegetarian is only the eater of the dumb.

Meanwhile our rotary island loaded with predatory life, and more
drenched with blood, both animal and vegetable, than ever mutinied ship,
scuds through space with unimaginable speed, and turns alternate cheeks
to the reverberation of a blazing world, ninety million miles away.

II

What a monstrous spectre is this man, the disease of the agglutinated
dust, lifting alternate feet or lying drugged with slumber; killing,
feeding, growing, bringing forth small copies of himself; grown upon
with hair like grass, fitted with eyes that move and glitter in his
face; a thing to set children screaming;--and yet looked at nearlier,
known as his fellows know him, how surprising are his attributes! Poor
soul, here for so little, cast among so many hardships, filled with
desires so incommensurate and so inconsistent, sa