Consider the earth in its origin: at first, a shapeless nebula, becoming gradually more and more condensed; next, a globe of fire, of rocks in fusion, whirling for millions of years through space, with no other object than that of forming into a mass and cooling: an inconceivable incandescence, which none of our sources of heat can enable us to picture; an essential, scientific, absolute barrenness which may well have proclaimed itself irremediable and everlasting. Who would have thought that from these torrents of matter in eruption, which seemed to have destroyed for ever all life or the least germ of life, there would emerge each and every form of life itself, from the most enormous, the strongest, the most enduring, the most impetuous, the most abundant, down to the slightest, the least visible, the most precarious, the most ephemeral, the most exiguous? Who above all could have dared foresee that they would give birth to what seems so utterly alien to the liquefied or pasty rocks and metals that alone formed the surface, the nucleus and the very entity of our globe, I mean our human intelligence and consciousness? 6 Is it possible to imagine a more unexpected evolution and ending? What could astonish us after so great an astonishment and what are we not entitled to hope of a world which, after being what it was, has produced what we see and what we are? Considering that it started from a sort of negation of life, from integral barrenness and from worse than nothing, in order to end in us, where will it not end after starting from ourselves? If its birth and formation have elaborated such prodigies, what prodigies may not its existence, its indefinite prolongation and its dissolution hold in store for us? There are an immeasurable distance and inconceivable transformations between the one frightful material of the early days and the human thought of this moment; and there will doubtless be a like distance and like transformations as difficult to conceive between the thought of this moment and that which will succeed it in the infinity of time. It seems as if, in the beginning, our earth did not know what to do with its material and with its force, which inter-devoured each other. In the vast, flaming void in which it was being consumed, it had not yet the shadow of an object or an idea; to-day, it has so many that our scholars wear out their lives to no purpose in seeking them and are overwhelmed by the number of its mysterious and inexhaustible combinations. At that time it disposed of but a single force, the most destructive that we knew, fire. If everything was born of fire, which itself seemed to be born only to destroy, what will not be born of that which seems to be born only to produce, beget and multiply? If it was able to do so much with the lava and the red-hot cinders which were the only elements that it possessed, what will it not be able to do with all that it will end by possessing? 7