Science goes on unceasingly erasing itself,--fruitful erasures. Who knows now what is the "Homœomeria" of Anaximenes, which perhaps belongs in reality to Anaxagoras? Cosmography is notably amended since the time when this same Anaxagoras told Pericles that the sun was almost as large as the Peloponnesus. Many planets, and satellites of planets, have been discovered since the four stars of Medici. Entomology has made some advance since the time when it was asserted that the scarabee was somewhat of a god and a cousin of the sun,--firstly, on account of the thirty toes on its feet, which correspond to the thirty days of the solar month; secondly, because the scarabee is without a female, like the sun; and when Saint Clement, of Alexandria, out-bidding Plutarch, made the remark that the scarabee, like the sun, passes six months in the earth and six months under it. Do you wish to have the proof of this?--refer to the "Stromates," paragraph IV. Scholasticism itself, chimerical as it is, gives up the "Holy Meadow" of Moschus, laughs at the "Holy Ladder" of John Climacus, and is ashamed of the century in which Saint Bernard, adding fuel to the stake which the Viscounts of Campania wished to put out, called Arnaud de Bresse "a man with the head of the dove and the tail of the scorpion." The cardinal virtues are no longer the law in anthropology. The _steyardes_ of the great Arnauld are decayed. However uncertain is meteorology, it is far from discussing now, as it did in the twelfth century, whether a rain which saves an army from dying of thirst is due to the Christian prayers of the Melitine legion or to the Pagan intervention of Jupiter Pluvius. The astrologer, Marcian Posthumus, was for Jupiter; Tertullian was for the Melitine legion. No one stood in favour of the cloud and of the wind. Locomotion, if we go from the antique chariot of Laïus to the railway, passing by the _patache_, the track-boat, the _turgotine_, the diligence, and the mail, has made some progress indeed. The time is gone by for the famous journey from Dijon to Paris, lasting a month; and we could not understand to-day the amazement of Henry IV. asking of Joseph Scaliger, "Is it true, Monsieur l'Escale, that you have been from Paris to Dijon without relieving your bowels?" Micrography is now far beyond Leuwenhoeck, who was himself far beyond Swammerdam. Look at the point to which spermatology and ovology are arrived to-day, and recollect Mariana reproaching Arnaud de Villeneuve, who discovered alcohol and the oil of turpentine, with the strange crime of having tried human generation in a pumpkin. Grand-Jean de Fouchy, the not over-credulous life secretary of the Academy of Sciences, a hundred years ago, would have shaken his head if any one had told him that from the solar spectrum one would pass to the igneous spectrum, then to the stellar spectrum, and that by the aid of the spectrum of flames and of the spectrum of