it to the
top of steep mountains, and makes use of its weight to let it fall,
in order to rise again, as high as it was at first. But man who
leads waters with such absolute command is in his turn led by them.
Water is one of the greatest moving powers that man can employ to
supply his defects in the most necessary arts, either through the
smallness or weakness of his body. But the waters which,
notwithstanding their fluidity, are such ponderous bodies, do
nevertheless rise above our heads, and remain a long while hanging
there. Do you see those clouds that fly, as it were, on the wings
of the winds? If they should fall, on a sudden, in watery pillars,
rapid like a torrent, they would drown and destroy everything where
they should happen to fall, and the other grounds would remain dry.
What hand keeps them in those pendulous reservatories, and permits
them to fall only by drops as if they distilled through a gardener's
watering-pot? Whence comes it that in some hot countries, where
scarce any rain ever falls, the nightly dews are so plentiful that
they supply the want of rain; and that in other countries, such as
the banks of the Nile and Ganges, the regular inundation of rivers,
at certain seasons of the year, never fails to make up what the
inhabitants are deficient in for the watering of the ground? Can
one imagine measures better concerted to render all countries
fertile and fruitful?

Thus water quenches, not only the thirst of men, but likewise of
arid lands: and He who gave us that fluid body has carefully
distributed it throughout the earth, like pipes in a garden. The
waters fall from the tops of mountains where their reservatories are
placed. They gather into rivulets in the bottom of valleys. Rivers
run in winding streams through vast tracts of land, the better to
water them; and, at last, they precipitate themselves into the sea,
in order to make it the centre of commerce for all nations. That
ocean, which seems to be placed in the midst of lands, to make an
eternal separation between them, is, on the contrary, the common
rendezvous of all the people of the earth, who could not go by land
from one end of the world to the other without infinite fatigue,
tedious journeys, and numberless dangers. It is by that trackless
road, across the bottomless deep, that the whole world shakes hands
with the new; and that the new supplies the old with so many
conveniences and riches. The waters, distributed