its head, which, like the skin, is renewed
every year, the first function of the new being to digest the old
one."

Here the Pilot manifested some symptoms of incredulity.

"That is not all, Willis," continued Ernest, "the animal of which I
speak carries its eggs in the interior of its body till they are
hatched, and then transfers them to its tail. It has pebbles in its
stomach, can throw off its limbs when they incommode it, and replace
them with others more to its fancy. To finish the portrait, its eyes
are placed at the tip of long flexible horns."

"Do you really mean me to believe that yarn?" inquired Willis.

"Yes, Willis, unless you intend to deny the existence of lobsters."

"Lobsters! Ah! you are talking of them, are you!"

"Have not," continued Ernest, "six thousand three hundred and
sixty-two eyes been counted in one beetle? sixteen thousand in a fly?
and as many as thirty-four thousand six hundred in a butterfly? Of
course, facets understood."

"Supposing these facets myope or presbyte," observed Jack, "that gives
seventeen thousand three hundred and twenty-five pairs of spectacles
on one nose!"

"How wonderfully varied are the forms of Nature. If, from the mastodon
and the fossil mammoth, to which Buffon attributes five or six times
the bulk and size of the elephant, we descend to those animalculae, of
which Leuwenhoek estimates that a thousand millions of them would not
occupy the place of an ordinary grain of sand."

Here Willis lost all patience and left the gallery, whistling as
usual, under such circumstances, the "Mariner's March."

"Malesieu has detected animals by the microscope twenty-seven times
smaller than a mite. A single drop of water under this instrument
assumes the aspect of a lake, peopled by an infinite multitude of
living creatures."

"Therefore," observed Wolston, "it is not the great works of Nature,
or those of which the organization is most perfect, that alone
presents to the mind of man the unfathomable mysteries of creation;
atoms become to him problems, that utterly defy the utmost efforts of
his intelligence."

"Which," suggested Becker, "does not prevent us believing ourselves a
well of science, nor hinder us from piling Pelion on Ossa to scale the
skies."

"What becomes, in the presence of these facts, of the metaphysics and
cosmogonies that have succeeded each other for two thousand years?
What of all the theories, from Ptolemy to Copernicus, from Copernicus