Now I read in a work of George Darwin's (son of the great naturalist) on the tides that the earth in many ways behaves more like a living organism than like a rigid insensate sphere. Its surface throbs and palpitates and quivers and yields to pressure as only living organisms do. The tides can hardly be regarded as evidences of its breathing, as Kepler thought they could, but they are proof of how closely it is held in the clasp of the heavenly forces. It is like an apple on the vast sidereal tree, that has mellowed and ripened with age. Our moon is no doubt as dead as matter can be. It is hard to fancy its surface yielding to our tread as does that of the earth. Then we know that the absence of air and water on it is proof that it cannot be endowed with what we call life. George Darwin tells us that when we walk on the ground we warp and bend the surface very much as we might bend or dent the epidermis of a colossal pachyderm. He and his brother devised an instrument by which the slight fluctuations of the ground, as we move over it, could be measured. The instrument was so delicate that it revealed the difference of effect produced by the same pressure at seven feet and at six feet from the instrument! More than that, the instrument revealed the throbbing and agitations which the ground is undergoing at all times. They found that minute earthquakes, or microseisms, as the Italians call them, are occurring constantly. Another instrument has been invented called the microphone, which translates this earth's movements into sound--its tremors and agitations become audible. This microphone, when placed in a cave twenty feet below the surface, and carefully protected by means of a carpet from any accidental disturbance in its immediate vicinity, revealed what is called "natural telluric phenomena; such as roarings, explosions, occurring isolated or in volleys, and metallic or bell-like sounds." "The noises sometimes become intolerably loud," especially on one occasion in the middle of the night, half an hour before a sensible earthquake. Our apparently impassive and slumbering old planet evidently has dreams we know little of.