These things, belonging to the domain of the senses, possess a relative æsthetic value, subordinated to the organism that judges them. Certainly the Venus of Melos and the Apollo Belvedere are superb works; but even so it takes a special eye to appreciate them. Micromégas, if he saw them, would be full of pity for the leanness of human forms. To him the beautiful calls for something other than our sorry, frog-like anatomy. Show him, on the other hand, that sort of abortive windmill by means of which Pythagoras, echoing the wise men of Egypt, teaches us the fundamental properties of the right-angled triangle. Should the good giant, contrary to our expectation, happen not to know about it, explain to him what the windmill means. Once the light has entered his mind, he will find, just as we do, that there is beauty there, real beauty, not certainly in that horrible hieroglyphic, the figure, but in the unchangeable relation between the lengths of the three sides; he will admire as much as we do geometry the eternal balancer of space. There is, therefore, a severe beauty, belonging to the domain of reason, the same in every world, the same under every sun, whether the suns be single or many, white or red, blue or yellow. This universal beauty is order. Everything is done by weight and measure, a great statement whose truth breaks upon us all the more vividly as we probe more deeply into the mystery of things. Is this order, upon which the equilibrium of the universe is based, the predestined result of a blind mechanism? Does it enter into the plans of an Eternal Geometer, as Plato had it? Is it the ideal of a supreme lover of beauty, which would explain everything? Why all this regularity in the curve of the petals of a flower, why all this elegance in the chasings on a Beetle’s wing-cases? Is that infinite grace, even in the tiniest details, compatible with the brutality of uncontrolled forces? One might as well attribute the artist’s exquisite medallion to the steam-hammer which makes the slag sweat in the melting. These are very lofty thoughts concerning a miserable cylinder which will bear a crop of caterpillars. It cannot be helped. The moment one tries to dig out the least detail of things, up starts a why which scientific investigation is unable to answer. The riddle of the world has certainly its explanation otherwhere than in the little truths of our laboratories. But let us leave Micromégas to philosophize and return to the commonplaces of observation.