Like the various objects which a clever artist introduces into his sketch, they are placed without uniformity, but still with reference to their effect upon each other, and so to the unity of the general design." "Therefore," remarked Ernest, "we have an animal whose skin is of stone, which it throws off annually to assume a new one--whose flesh is its tail and in its feet--whose hair is found inside in its breast--whose stomach is in its head, which, like the skin, is renewed every year, the first function of the new being to digest the old one." Here the Pilot manifested some symptoms of incredulity.
"That is not all, Willis," continued Ernest, "the animal of which I speak carries its eggs in the interior of its body till they are hatched, and then transfers them to its tail.

It has pebbles in its stomach, can throw off its limbs when they incommode it, and replace them with others more to its fancy.

To finish the portrait, its eyes are placed at the tip of long flexible horns." "Do you really mean me to believe that yarn ?" inquired Willis.
"Yes, Willis, unless you intend to deny the existence of lobsters." "Lobsters! Ah! you are talking of them, are you!" "Have not," continued Ernest, "six thousand three hundred and sixty-two eyes been counted in one beetle?
sixteen thousand in a fly?
and as many as thirty-four thousand six hundred in a butterfly?
Of course, facets understood." "Supposing these facets myope or presbyte," observed Jack, "that gives seventeen thousand three hundred and twenty-five pairs of spectacles on one nose!" "How wonderfully varied are the forms of Nature.

If, from the mastodon and the fossil mammoth, to which Buffon attributes five or six times the bulk and size of the elephant, we descend to those animalculae, of which Leuwenhoek estimates that a thousand millions of them would not occupy the place of an ordinary grain of sand." Here Willis lost all patience and left the gallery, whistling as usual, under such circumstances, the "Mariner's March." "Malesieu has detected animals by the microscope twenty-seven times smaller than a mite.

A single drop of water under this instrument assumes the aspect of a lake, peopled by an infinite multitude of living creatures." "Therefore," observed Wolston, "it is not the great works of Nature, or those of which the organization is most perfect, that alone presents to the mind of man the unfathomable mysteries of creation; atoms become to him problems, that utterly defy the utmost efforts of his intelligence." "Which," suggested Becker, "does not prevent us believing ourselves a well of science, nor hinder us from piling Pelion on Ossa to scale the skies." "What becomes, in the presence of these facts, of the metaphysics and cosmogonies that have succeeded each other for two thousand years?
What of all the theories, from Ptolemy to Copernicus, from Copernicus to Galileo, Descartes and his zones, Leibnitz and his monads, Wolf and his fire forces, Maupertuis and his intelligent elements, Broussais, who, in his anatomical lectures, has oftener than once shown to his pupils, on the point of his scalpel, the source of thought; what, I say, becomes of all these ?" "There is less wisdom in such vain speculation than in these simple words: '_I believe in God the Father, the Creator of all things_.'" "Worlds," says Isaiah, "are, before Him, like the dew-drops on a blade of grass." "We are now, however, getting into the clouds," remarked Wolston; "let us return to the earth by the shortest route.