Whatever may be thought of their birth, our atoms, when once born, present a world infinitely and admirably varied. All forms of life are there honorably represented. If they know themselves, they must consider that they compose among themselves a harmony so complete as to leave but little to desire. They are not dispersed species, created apart; they clearly form a kingdom in which the various species have organized a great division of the vital labor. They have collective beings like our polypus or coral insect, engaged in the servitude of a common life; and they have their minute molluscs which already display their minute and delicate shells; they have their swiftly swimming fish and whirling insects, proud crustaceæ, miniatures of the future crabs, armed, like them, to the teeth; warrior, atoms that chase and devour inoffensive atoms. And all this in an enormous and marvellous abundance, which shows the comparative poverty of our visible world. Without speaking of those Rhizopodes which have made their part of the Apennines and the Cordilleras,--the Foramineferes, alone, that numerous tribe of shelled atoms, amount, according to Charles d'Orbigny, to two thousand species. They are contemporary with every age of the earth; they present themselves at all the various depths of our thirty crises of the globe; sometimes varying a little in form, but always existing as species; identical witnesses of the life of the earth. In the present day the cold current from the south pole which the point of America cuts in two, sends forty species towards La Plata and forty towards Chili. But the great scene of their creation and organization appears to be the warm stream of the sea which flows from the Antilles. The northern currents kill them. The great paternal torrent drifts myriads of their dead to Newfoundland in our ocean, whose bottom is paved with them. When the illustrious godfather of the atoms, Ehrenberg, baptised them and introduced them to the scientific world, he was accused of being too favorable to them, and of exaggerating the character of those little creatures. He declared them to be a complicated and elevated organization. So liberally did he endow them, that he gave them a hundred and twenty stomachs. The visible world became jealous of these invisibles, and, by a violent reaction, Dujardin reduced them to the lowest degree of simplicity. The asserted organs he treated as mere appearances; but, as he could not deny their obvious and great powers of absorption, he granted them the gift of being able to improvise stomachs proportioned to what they had to swallow. M. Pouchet does not coincide with this opinion, but rather inclines to that of Ehrenberg. What is incontestable and admirable in these atoms is the vigor of movement.