cience could put a living being to sleep and
wake him up again at the end of an infinite number of years--arrest all
the functions of the system, suspend life itself, protect an individual
against the action of time for a century or two, and afterwards
resuscitate him."

"He was a fool then!" cried Madame Renault.

"I wouldn't swear it. But he had his own ideas touching the main-spring
which moves a living organism. Do you remember, good mother mine, the
impression you experienced as a little girl, when some one first showed
you the inside of a watch in motion? You were satisfied that there was a
restless little animal inside the case, who worked twenty-four hours a
day at turning the hands. If the hands stopped going, you said: 'It is
because the little animal is dead.' Yet possibly he was only asleep.

"It has since been explained to you that a watch contains an assemblage
of parts well fitted to each other and kept well oiled, which, being
wound, can be considered to move spontaneously in a perfect
correspondence. If a spring become broken, if a bit of the wheel work be
injured, or if a grain of sand insinuate itself between two of the
parts, the watch stops, and the children say rightly: 'The little animal
is dead.' But suppose a sound watch, well made, right in every
particular, and stopped because the machinery would not run from lack of
oil; the little animal is not dead; nothing but a little oil is needed
to wake him up.

"Here is a first-rate chronometer, made in London. It runs fifteen days
without being wound. I gave it a turn of the key yesterday: it has,
then, thirteen days to run. If I throw it on the ground, or if I break
the main-spring, all is over. I will have killed the little animal. But
suppose that, without damaging anything, I find means to withdraw or dry
up the fine oil which now enables the parts to slip upon one another:
will the little animal be dead? No! It will be asleep. And the proof is
that I can lay my watch in a drawer, keep it there twenty-five years,
and if, after a quarter of a century, I put a drop of oil on it, the
parts will begin to move again. All that time would have passed without
waking up the little sleeping animal. It will still have thirteen days
to go, after the time when it starts again.

"All living beings, according to the opinion of Professor Meiser, are
watches, or organisms which move, breathe, nourish themselves, and
reproduce themselves as long as their orga