No less droll are the arguments drawn from natural history to prove the love displayed in the order of the universe. Chateaubriand writes: "Is an alligator, is a serpent, is a tiger less loving to its young than a nightingale, a hen, or even a woman?... Is it not as wonderful as it is touching to see an alligator build a nest and lay eggs like a hen, and a little monster come out of the shell just like a chicken? How many touching truths are contained in this strange contrast! how it leads us to love the goodness of God!" Chateaubriand is positively jocose in his attempts to prove the divine purpose evident in nature. He declares that the birds of passage come to us at a season when the earth yields no crops on purpose to be fed; and he maintains that the domestic animals are born with exactly the amount of instinct required to enable us to tame them. When the Neo-Catholic authors embark on any subject connected with natural science, they at once become extremely comic. Any one interested should read (in his review of Bonald's _La législation primitive_) Chateaubriand's outburst of horror at having heard a little boy answer his teacher's question: What is man? with the words: A mammal. And in the same spirit De Maistre repeatedly asserts that the whole science of chemistry requires to be placed on a different, a religious basis, or declares his conviction that some honest scientist will certainly succeed in proving that it is not the moon, but God, who produces the ebb and flow of the tide, as also that water, which is an element, cannot be resolved into oxygen and hydrogen. He is of opinion that birds are a living proof of the incorrectness of the law of gravitation. In this connection one of the characters in his _Soirées de St. Pétersbourg_ remarks that there is more of the supernatural in birds than in other animals, a fact witnessed to by the signal honour shown them in the choice of the dove to represent the Holy Spirit. That alligators should lay eggs, that birds should fly--such feats are miracles in the eyes of the Neo-Catholics. On the dogmatic part of the work follows the æsthetic, which is the more important. In it Chateaubriand endeavours to prove that "of all the religions which have ever existed, the Christian religion is the most poetical, the most human, the most favourable to freedom, to art, and to literature--that to it the modern world owes everything, from agriculture to the abstract sciences, from asylums for the unfortunate to churches built by Michael Angelo and ornamented by Raphael--that there is nothing more divine than its morality, nothing more beautiful and noble than its dogmas and its rites--that it favours genius, purifies taste, approves and stimulates virtuous passion, invigorates thought, provides poets and artists with the noblest themes, &c., &c."