lation to believe in the silence of the night: that on the
contrary, the real aim of Astronomy, instead of ending with statements
of the positions and movements of the stars, is to enable us to
penetrate to them, to make us divine, and know, and appreciate their
physical constitution, their degree of life and intellectuality in the
universal order?

On the Earth, it is Life and Thought that flourish; and it is Life and
Thought that we seek again in these starry constellations strewn to
Infinitude amid the immeasurable fields of Heaven.

The humble little planet that we inhabit presents itself to us as a
brimming cup, overflowing at every outlet. Life is everywhere. From the
bottom of the seas, from the valleys to the mountains, from the
vegetation that carpets the soil, from the mold in the fields and woods,
from the air we breathe, arises an immense, prodigious, and perpetual
murmur. Listen! it is the great voice of Nature, the sum of all the
unknown and mysterious voices that are forever calling to us, from the
ocean waves, from the forest winds, from the 300,000 kinds of insects
that are redundant everywhere, and make a lively community on the
surface of our globe. A drop of water contains thousands of curious and
agile creatures. A grain of dust from the streets of Paris is the home
of 130,000 bacteria. If we turn over the soil of a garden, field, or
meadow, we find the earthworms working to produce assimilable slime. If
we lift a stone in the path, we discover a crawling population. If we
gather a flower, detach a leaf, we everywhere find little insects living
a parasitic existence. Swarms of midges fly in the sun, the trees of the
wood are peopled with nests, the birds sing, and chase each other at
play, the lizards dart away at our approach, we trample down the
antheaps and the molehills. Life enwraps us in an inexorable
encroachment of which we are at once the heroes and the victims,
perpetuating itself to its own detriment, as imposed upon it by an
eternal reproduction. And this from all time, for the very stones of
which we build our houses are full of fossils so prodigiously multiplied
that one gram of such stone will often contain millions of shells,
marvels of geometrical perfection. The infinitely little is equal to the
infinitely great.

Life appears to us as a fatal law, an imperious force which all obey, as
the result and the aim of the association of atoms. This is illustrated
for us upon the Earth,