Man has arisen out of the earth. And can the dead give birth to the living? Such an idea is self-contradictory. If the Earth has produced us, it cannot be really a mere dead lump, as nineteenth-century materialistic science regarded it. It must be alive. The fifteen hundred millions or so of human beings who live on its surface like microscopic insects on the body of an elephant, or like epidermis-cells on our own bodies, constitute in their total weight and size only an almost infinitesimal proportion of the earth's mass. The earth is 8,000 miles in diameter; if human beings were so numerous that they could only stand up, wedged together all over its surface, tropics and poles, land and water--the latter covers seven-tenths of it--they would only be like a skin 1/200,000th part of an inch thick, on a globe a yard in diameter. The total mass of all the living creatures on the earth's surface, including all animals and all vegetation, is almost inconceivably small, as compared with the mass of the earth. Is it not a trifle ludicrous to find some of these little creatures looking down so condescendingly on the remainder of the planet? Emerson was among the few who have seen the joke, for in _Hamatreya_ he satirises those who boast of possessing pieces of the earth: Where are these men? Asleep beneath their grounds: And strangers, fond as they, their furrows plough. Earth laughs in flowers, to see her boastful boys Earth-proud, proud of the earth which is not theirs; Who steer the plough, but cannot steer their feet Clear of the grave. And the earth sings: They called me theirs, Who so controlled me; Yet every one Wished to stay, and is gone, How am I theirs, If they cannot hold me, But I hold them?