Quartz, basalt, porphyry, and semi-vitrified flints, each and all receive from these minute laborers a new, a more graceful, and a more fecund garb; from the fecund maternal milk (for such we must call the _mucus_ of the Sea) they absorb and restore, and thus build up, and secure, and fructify, and beautify, this, our habitable earth. It is from these more favoring localities that have arisen our primal species. These works must have been commenced among the volcanic isles and islets, in the depths of their Archipelagoes, in those sinuous windings, those peaceful labyrinths where the tides enter timidly and gently, warm and sheltered cradles for the newly-born. But the bolder strength of the fully-expanded flower, is to be sought for in, for instance, the vast depths of the Indian Gulfs. There, the Sea is veritably a great artist. There she gives to the earth its most adorable forms, lively, loving, and lovable. With her assiduous caresses she rounds or slopes the shore, and gives it those maternal outlines, and I had almost said the visible tenderness of that feminine bosom on which the pleased child finds so softly safe a shelter, such warmth, such saving warmth, and rest. CHAPTER III. THE ATOM. From the bottom of his nets a fisherman one day gave me three almost dying creatures, a sea hedge-hog, a sea star, and another star, a pretty ophiure, which still moved and soon lost its delicate arms. I gave them some sea water, but forgot them for two days, and when I again saw them, all were dead. On the surface of the water a thick gelatinous film had formed. I took an atom of this on the point of a needle; that atom, when placed under the microscope, showed me the following scene. A whirling crowd of short, thick, strongly built animals--_Kolpodes_--rushed to and fro as though intoxicated with their sense of life, delighted, I may say, that they were born and keeping their birthday with a perfectly bacchanalian joy, while microscopic eels--_Vibrions_--swam less than vibrated to spring forward. Wearied with the contemplation of such movement, the eye, however, soon remarked, that all was not in motion, there were some vibrions yet stiff and still, and there were some intertwined in heaps which had not yet detached themselves and which looked as though expecting the moment of their deliverance. In that living fermentation of still motionless creatures, the disorderly Kolpodes rushed and raged, hither and thither, regaling and fattening themselves at will. And this grand spectacle was displayed within the compass of an atom of film taken on the point of a needle! How many such scenes would be enacted in the whole of the gelatinous film which had so promptly formed on the surface of the water containing three dead creatures! The time had been wonderfully put to profit. In two days the dead had made a world; for three animals that I had lost I had gained millions, abounding in youth, absorbed in a real fury of new life!