The Earth which we inhabit was not yet in existence. The materials which compose it floated through space in a state of diffused nebulosity, gravitating about the slowly condensing solar focus. There were as yet neither water, nor air, nor earth, nor heavens, nor planets, nor animals, nor any one of those bodies reputed to be simple by chemistry, as oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, lead, copper, etc. The gas (which by its condensations and final transformations was eventually to give rise to the various gaseous, liquid, and solid substances at present constituting our globe and its inhabitants) was a single homogeneous gas, containing within it, like an unconscious chrysalis, the possibilities of the future. But no prophet could have foreseen the unknown which slumbered amid its mysteries. Our planet showed at that time the aspect of those vague gaseous nebulæ which the telescope discovers on the floor of the skies and which the spectroscope analyses. The solar nebula in the course of condensation floated among the stars. All humanity with its history, every one of us with all his energies, all the living beings of this Earth, were contained in the germ of that nebula and its forces; but the beings and the things which we know were not to come into existence until after a long incubation of centuries. In the place of what was destined to be the Earth, there was nothing but a gas floating in starry space. Nor was it in the real “space” where we are now, for the Earth, the planets, and the whole solar system came from afar and flew swiftly across the void. * * * * * In the history of creation, 100 million years pass like a day; they dwindle and disappear, a fugitive dream, into the bosom of that eternity which absorbs all. Then, although our planet did not exist, there were stars, suns, solar systems, and inhabited worlds as there are now. The humanities which peopled those worlds lived their lives as we live ours. It would have been a wonderful spectacle for the thinker to contemplate the great work of all those beings. In passion or indifference, in pleasure or pain, in laughter or tears, in movement or repose, they lived; fighting, forgiving; accusing, forgetting; loving, hating; being born and dying; drawn into the fatal whirlpool; blindly succeeding each other through the generations and centuries, not knowing what gave them birth; ignorant of the fate in store for individuals and souls; playthings of that Nature which forms worlds and beings, stars and atoms, centuries and minutes, like soap-bubbles blown by a child into the air; and all plunging into the sea, like those whirls of sand which the desert wind raises and blows along in the typhoon or the breeze. It is the same spectacle as that which the earth offers to-day; living multitudes fighting for life and knowing only death.