I remained in thought for a moment. Was this man out of his mind? Whether or no, his madness was a fine frenzy. "Well," he went on, "one day people will discover water-sprites, gnomes, sylphs, nymphs, angels, just as I discovered my animalcule. All that is needed is to find a microscope capable of perceiving the infinitely transparent, just as we have discovered one for the infinitely little. Before the invention of the solar microscope, creation, to man's eyes, stopped short at the acarus, the seison; he little thought there were snakes in his water, crocodiles in his vinegar, blue dolphins ... in other things. The solar microscope was invented and he saw them all." I sat dumbfounded. I had never heard anyone speak of such extraordinary things. "Good gracious! monsieur," I said to him, "you open out to me a whole world of whose existence I knew nothing. What! are there serpents in water?" "Hydras." "Crocodiles in our vinegar?" "Ichthyosauri." "And blue dolphins in ...? But it is impossible!" "Ah! that is the usual formula--'It is impossible!' ... You said just now,'It is impossible!' in reference to things we do not see. And now you say 'It is impossible' of things that everybody else but yourself has seen. All 'impossibility' is relative: what is impossible to the oyster is not impossible to the fish; what is impossible to the fish is not impossible to the serpent; what is impossible to the serpent is not impossible to the quadruped; what is impossible to the quadruped is not impossible to man; what is impossible to man is not impossible with God. When Fulton offered to demonstrate the existence of steam to Napoleon, Napoleon said, as you, 'It is impossible!' and had he lived two or three years longer he would have seen pass by, from the top of his rocky island, their funnels smoking, the machines that might still have kept him emperor, had he not scorned them as the creatures of a dream, utopian and impossible! Even Job prophesied steamships...." "Job prophesied steamships?" "Yes, most certainly.... What else do you think his description of leviathan meant, whom he calls the king of the seas?--'I will not forget the leviathan, his strength and the marvellous structure of his body. By his neesings a light doth shine, and his eyes are like the eyelids of the morning. Out of his nostrils goeth smoke, as out of a seething pot or caldron. His breath kindleth coals: his heart is as firm as a stone, yea, as hard as a piece of the nether millstone. He maketh the deep to boil as a pot; he maketh the sea like a pot of ointment. He maketh a path to shine after him: one would think the deep to be hoary. Upon earth there is not his like, who is made without fear.' Leviathan is, of course, the modern steamship!"