"Permit me to remark at once," said the younger, "that your planet is an absolute failure, in consequence of an occurrence which happened about ten million years ago. It was at the time of the primary period of the earthly genesis. There were plants already, and very fine plants too; the first animals were beginning to appear in the depths of the sea and along the shores,--mollusks that were headless, deaf, mute, and without sex. You know that respiration is all a tree requires for its entire nourishment, and that your most robust oaks, your most gigantic cedars, have never eaten anything, and that that has not prevented their growth. They are nourished solely by respiration. Misfortune, Fatality, had willed that a drop of water thicker than the surrounding medium should pass through one of the mollusks. Perhaps he liked it. That was the first digestive tube, which was to exert so baleful an effect on the entire animal kingdom, and later on mankind itself. The first murderer was the mollusk who ate. Here we do not eat, have never eaten, and never shall eat. Creation is developing itself gradually, peacefully, and nobly, as it began. Organisms are nourished; or, to express it differently, renew their molecules by a simple respiration, like your terrestrial trees, each leaf of which is a little stomach. In your precious country you can live a single day only on condition of killing. With you, the law of life is the law of death. Here, the idea of killing even a bird has never occurred to any one. [Illustration] "You are all more or less butchers. Your hands are stained with blood, your stomachs are gorged with food. How can you expect to have wholesome, pure, elevated ideas,--I will even say (excuse my frankness) clean ideas,--with such coarse organisms? What souls could live in such bodies? Reflect a moment, and do not soothe yourself any more with blind illusions, too ideal for such a world." "What!" I cried, interrupting him, "do you deny us the possibility of having clean ideas? Do you take human beings for animals? Have Homer, Plato, Phidias, Seneca, Virgil, Dante, Columbus, Bacon, Galileo, Pascal, Leonardo, Raphael, Mozart, Beethoven, never had lofty aspirations? You think our bodies coarse and repulsive; if you had seen Helen, Phryne, Aspasia, Sappho, Cleopatra, Lucretia Borgia, Agnes Sorel, Diane de Poitiers, Marguerite de Valois, Borghese, Talien, Récamier, Georges, and their charming rivals, you would perhaps think differently. Ah, my dear Martial, let me in my turn regret that you know the Earth only from afar." "You are mistaken there; I lived in that world for fifty years. That was enough for me, and I assure you I would not return to it again. Everything is a failure there, even--what seems most delightful to you. Do you imagine that in all the earths of heaven the flowers produce the fruits of the same sorts? Would not that be a little cruel? As for me, I like primroses and rosebuds."