"We," the imperceptibles might say,--the obscure and unnamed animalcules despised or ignored by man,--"we are thy guardians, have laid out thy fields, and built thy dwelling-places. It is not the great fossil rhinoceros or mastodon whose bones have made thy soil; it is _our_ work--or rather, it is ourselves. Thy cities, thy Louvres, and thy Capitols are constructed with our _débris_. Life itself in its essence, in that sparkling beverage by which France diffuses joy over all the earth, whence comes it? From arid hills where the vine thrives in the white dust that once was _we_, and absorbs the concealed warmth of our prior existences." The demand made upon us would be a lengthened one; restitution impossible. These dead myriads, having nourished with their lime the various articles that form our sustenance, have passed into our very being. Others also would put forth a claim. The very pebble, the hard flint, once lived, and now nourishes life. Great was the astonishment in Europe when a Berlin professor--Ehrenberg--informed us that the silicious stone, so sharp, rough, and brittle, the _tripoli_ with which metals are polished, is neither more nor less than an aggregation of dead animalcules, an accumulation of the shells of infusoria of a terrible diminutiveness. So small is the creature I speak of, that it takes one hundred and eighty-seven millions to weigh a grain. [Illustration] The labours of the unseen architects of the globe, admired by our men of science in extinct species, travellers have discovered revived in living species. They have surprised, in our own day, immense laboratories in permanent activity, of beings invisible in themselves, or apparently powerless, but really of boundless capacity of toil, if we judge by its results. What death accomplishes for life, life itself relates. Numbers of tiny organisms become by their present works the interpreters and historians of their vanished predecessors. These, like the latter, with their structures, or their _débris_, build up islands in the sea, and construct immense banks of reefs, which, gradually joining together, will become new lands. Without going further than Sicily, we find among the madrepores, that cover its coasts torn by volcanic fires, a little animal, the zoophyte, which has accomplished a task man would never have dared to undertake. He contrives to move forward by protecting his soft body with a shield of stone which he incessantly secretes. Continuously developing the tubes which in succession afford him shelter, he entirely fills up the empty spaces left by the madrepores or corals, bridges over the intervals between the reefs, and connects them with one another; finally, he creates a passage in defiles previously impassable. In due time this builder will have accomplished the colossal task of a causeway all around the island in its circumference of a hundred and eighty leagues.