Moon -- Fiction; Science fiction, French -- Translations into English; Space flight to the moon -- Fiction
"For tell me, pray, is it a hard thing to be believed, that a Louse
takes your Body for a World; and that when any one of them travels
from one of your Ears to the other, his Companions say, that he hath
travelled the Earth from end to end, or that he hath run from one
Pole to the other? Yes, without doubt, those little People take your
Hair for the Forests of their Country; the Pores full of Liquor, for
Fountains; Buboes and Pimples, for Lakes and Ponds; Boils, for Seas;
and Defluxions, for Deluges: And when you Comb your self, forwards, and
backwards, they take that Agitation for the Flowing and Ebbing of the
Ocean. Doth not Itching make good what I say? What is the little Worm
that causes it but one of these little Animals, which hath broken off
from civil Society, that it may set up for a Tyrant in its Country? If
you ask me, why are they bigger than other imperceptible Creatures? I
ask you, why are Elephants bigger than we? And the _Irish_-men, than
_Spaniards_?
"As to the Blisters, and Scurff, which you know not the Cause of;
they must either happen by the Corruption of their Enemies, which
these little Blades have killed, or which the Plague has caused by the
scarcity of Food, for which the Seditious worried one another[2] and
left Mountains of Dead Carcases rotting in the Field; or because the
Tyrant, having driven away on all Hands his Companions, who by their
Bodies stopt up the Pores of ours, hath made way out for the waterish
matter, which being extravasted out of the Sphere of the Circulation
of our Blood, is corrupted. It may be asked, perhaps, why a Nit, or
Hand-worm, produces so many disorders: But that's easily conceived,
for as one Revolt begets another, so these little People, egg'd on by
the bad Example of their Seditious Companions, aspire severally to
Sovereign Command; and occasion every where War, Slaughter, and Famine.
"But you'll say, some are far less subject to Itching than others;
and, nevertheless, all are equally inhabited by these little Animals,
since you say they are the Cause of our Life. That's true; for we
observe, that Phlegmatick People are not so much given to scratching as
the Cholerick; because the People sympathizing with the Climate they
inhabit, are slower in a cold Body, than those others that are heated
by the temper of their Region, who frisk and stir, and cannot rest in
a place: Thus a Cholerick Man is more delicate than a Phlegmatick;
because being animated in many more Parts, and the Soul being the
Action of these little Beasts, he is capable of Feeling in all
places where these Cattle stir. Whereas the Phlegmatick Man, wanting
sufficient Heat to put that stirring Mobile in Action, is sensible but
in a few places.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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