Now, what did our settlers do at the sight of such cerebral atrophy? Several proposed, it is true, to exterminate these savages who might well become dangerous owing to their cunning and to their numbers, and to appropriate their dwelling-place after a certain amount of cleaning and painting and the removal of numerous little bells. Others proposed to reduce them to the status of slaves or servants in order to shift on to them all our menial work. But these two proposals were rejected. An attempt was made to civilize and to render less savage these poor cousins, and once the impossibility of any success in that direction had been ascertained the partition was carefully blocked up. VII THE ÆSTHETIC LIFE Such is the moral miracle wrought by our excellence which itself is begotten of love and beauty. But the intellectual marvels which have issued from the same source, merit a still more extended notice. It will be enough for me to indicate them as I go along. Let us first speak of the sciences. One might have thought that from the day that the stars and celestial bodies, the faunas and floras, ceased to play a certain part in our lives or that the manifold sources of observation and experience ceased to flow, astronomy and meteorology would henceforth be brought to a standstill while zoology and botany would have become palæontology pure and simple, without speaking of their application to the navy, army and agriculture, which are all to-day entirely obsolete; in fact, that they would have ceased to make a step forward and would have fallen into complete oblivion. Luckily these apprehensions proved groundless. Let us admire the extent to which the sciences which the past has bequeathed to us, formerly eminently useful and inductive, have for the first time had the advantage of passionately interesting and exciting the general public since they have acquired this double characteristic of being an object of luxury and a deductive subject. The past has accumulated such undigested masses of astronomical tables, papers and proceedings dealing with measurements, vivisections, and innumerable experiments, that the human mind can live on this capital till the end of time. It was high time that it began at last to arrange and utilize these materials. Now, for the sciences of which I am speaking, the advantage is great from the point of view of their success that they are entirely based on written testimony, and in no way on sense perception, and that they on all occasions invoke the authority of books (for we talk to-day of whole bibliographies when formerly people spoke of a single Bible--evidently an immense difference). This great and inestimable advantage consists in the extraordinary riches of our libraries in documents of the most diverse kinds which never leaves an ingenious theorist in the lurch, and is equal to supporting in a plenary and authoritative fashion the most contradictory opinions at one and the same symposium.