The day at length arrived on which, all the intellectual inheritance of the past, all the real capital of humanity having been rescued from the general shipwreck, the castaways were able to go down in their turn, having henceforth only to think of their own preservation. That day which forms, as everyone knows, the starting point of our new era, called the era of salvation, was a solemn holiday. The sun, however, as if to arouse regret, indulged in a few last bursts of sunshine. On casting a final glance on this brightness, which they were never to behold again, the survivors of mankind could not, we are told, restrain their tears. A young poet on the brink of the pit that yawned to swallow them up, repeated in the musical language of Euripides, the farewell to the light of the dying Iphigenia. But that was a short-lived moment of very natural emotion which speedily changed into an outburst of unspeakable delight. How great in fact was their amazement and their ecstasy! They expected a tomb; they opened their eyes in the most brilliant and interminable galleries of art they could possibly see, in _salons_ more beautiful than those of Versailles, in enchanted palaces, in which all extremes of climate, rain, and wind, cold and torrid heat were unknown; where innumerable lamps, veritable suns in brilliancy and moons in softness, shed unceasingly through the blue depths their daylight that knew no night. Assuredly the sight was far from what it has since become; we need an effort of imagination in order to represent the psychological condition of our poor ancestors, hitherto accustomed to the perpetual and insufferable discomforts and inconveniences of life on the surface of the globe, in order to realise their enthusiasm, at a moment, when only counting on escaping from the most appalling of deaths by means of the gloomiest of dungeons, they felt themselves delivered of all their troubles, and of all their apprehensions at the same time! Have you noticed in the retrospective museum that quaint bit of apparatus of our fathers, which is called an umbrella? Look at it and reflect on the heart-breaking element, in a situation, which condemned man to make use of this ridiculous piece of furniture. Imagine yourself obliged to protect yourselves against those gigantic downpours which would unexpectedly arrive on the scene and drench you for three or four days running. Think likewise of sailors caught in a whirling cyclone, of the victims of sunstroke, of the 20,000 Indians annually devoured by tigers or killed by the bite of venomous serpents; think of those struck by lightning. I do not speak of the legions of parasites and insects, of the acarus, the phylloxera, and the microscopic beings which drained the blood, the sweat, and the life of man, inoculating him with typhus, plague, and cholera. In truth, if our change of condition has demanded some sacrifices, it is not an illusion to declare that the balance of advantage is immensely greater.