I told you that the religion of the ancient Greeks was that which translated with least ugliness and least falsity the true state of the world which is invisible to you. There are gods, that is to say, a race of men as superior to other men as you are superior to the most intelligent or the best domesticated animals. You have conquered the earth; my ancestors conquered space, and colonised the greater number of the planets that gravitate round the sun. Our possible domain does not extend beyond the solar system; our actual domain does not stretch beyond Jupiter, where my father dwells, and its limit in the direction of the sun is this earth upon which we are. For a great number of centuries I have chosen Mars as a resting-place, and this brought me near you, and gave me certain humane inclinations. The other planets, by reason either of their distance from or of their nearness to the sun, are inaccessible to me, almost as much so as to yourselves. I do not know what goes on in them. As for the infinite worlds which are spread beyond our sphere, they are for me as for you the unknown and the unknowable. What I have just told you will not seem very new. Many of your philosophers have had imaginations that at some point touched this truth. Voltaire made Micromegas to tease you; but, submitting to the appearances of physical laws, he made an immoderate giant of him. Why so? Are not the ants, next to men, the most intelligent of terrestrial animals? I think I remember that at a far-distant epoch, that your geologists call, I believe, the coal age, the termites displayed on your globe a sort of genius. These little beings, so fragile, were cut short in their development by the lowering of the temperature. They no longer live but with a slackened vitality, like other insects; their intelligence, no longer nourished by an abundant physical activity, has congealed; they stopped at a point thenceforth impassable for them, and what they once accomplished by choice and will, they now no longer do except mechanically. But let us leave Micromegas.... I Micromegas has almost ceased to interest us. You have said, a little quickly for my intelligence, many things that would delight me if I better understood them. This slackened life .... HE