"Well, but still," I answered, "notwithstanding all that, there have been great minds on the Earth, and creatures really worthy of admiration. May we not comfort ourselves with the hope that physical and moral beauty will go on perfecting themselves more and more as they have done hitherto, and that intelligence will enlighten itself progressively? We do not spend all our time eating. Men will surely end, in spite of their material labors, by giving up a few hours every day to the development of their understanding. Then probably they will no longer continue to manufacture little gods in their own image; and perhaps also they will abolish their childish boundaries, so that harmony and fraternity may reign." [Illustration] "No, my friend, for if they wished it, they could do so now; but they are very careful not to. Terrestrial man is a little animal who on the one hand feels no need of thinking, not even having independence of soul, and who on the other likes to fight, and squarely establishes right by might. Such is his good pleasure, and such is his nature. You will never make peaches grow on a thorn-bush. Remember that the most exquisite beauties, to whom you alluded just now, are but coarse monsters compared to the aerial women of Mars, who live on our spring air, the perfume of our flowers, and are so captivating in the very quivering of their wings, in the ideal kiss of a mouth which has never eaten, that if Dante's Beatrice had been of such a nature, the immortal Florentine would never have been able to write two of the parts of his 'Divine Comedy;' he would have begun with Paradise, and could never have left it. Reflect that our youths have as much innate science as Pythagoras, Archimedes, Euclid, Kepler, Newton, Laplace, and Darwin after all their laborious studies; our twelve senses put us in direct communication with the universe; we feel from here Jupiter's attraction as he passes, a hundred million leagues away. We see the rings of Saturn with the naked eye, we detect the coming of a comet, and our body is impregnated with the solar electricity which puts all Nature in vibration. Here there has never been either religious fanaticism or executioners, or martyrs or international divisions or wars, but from the first, humanity, naturally peaceful, and freed from all material needs, has lived independent in body and mind, in a constant intellectual activity, raising itself unhindered to the knowledge of the truth. But come over here." [Illustration] * * * * *