assured of a thing, and I never felt so fully persuaded of my opinion as I was then; however, though my ardour is now a little abated, I still think it would be very strange for the earth to be so well inhabited, and the other planets perfectly solitary; and numerous as we know the inhabitants of the earth to be, we do not see them all, our world contains as many species of animals that are invisible to us, as of those that we discern. From the elephant to the hand-worm we can examine them; there our sight is bounded: but after the hand-worm is an infinitude of little animals not discernible by the naked eye, and to which, in point of size, he is an elephant. With magnifying glasses, we may see a drop of water, vinegar, or any other liquor, filled with little fishes or serpents, which we should never have thought of finding there; and some philosophers suppose the taste of these liquors is produced by punctures which the little animals make in the tongue. Mix these liquors with certain things, expose them to the sun, or leave it to corrupt, and you will find new sorts of animals. Many masses, apparently solid, contains scarcely any thing but a heap of these small animals, which in so confined a situation find room enough for their little movements. The leaf of a tree is a world, inhabited by worms imperceptibly small, to which it appears an amazing extent, having mountains and caverns, and so large that from one side of the leaf to the other the little worms have no more communication with each other than we have with the antipodes. From such considerations I cannot doubt of a great planet being inhabited. There have been found even in very hard stones an endless number of worms lodged in every interstice, feeding on parts of the stone. Consider the countless numbers of these little beings, and how many years they could subsist on a quantity of food as big as a grain of sand; and then though the moon should be but a mass of rock, we may let it be eaten by its inhabitants rather than not assign any to it. In short every thing is animated; every thing is full of life. Associate in your calculation all the species that have been lately discovered, and those that we may suppose are yet undiscovered, with all that we are in the habit of seeing, and you will surely confess that the earth is amply stocked with living creatures; that nature must delight in bestowing life since she has created such infinite variety of beings so small as to elude our sight. Can you believe that after the earth has been thus made to abound with life, the rest of the planets have not a living creature in them?