CHAPTER III.

WORLD-BUILDERS.

There is a world under this world, above, below, and all around it, of which we have no suspicion.

Occasionally, indeed, we catch a faint murmur, a sound, and thereupon we say, "It is a trifle, it is nothing." But this nothing is the Infinite.

The Infinite of the invisible life, the silent life, the world of night and of the inner earth, of the shadowy ocean,--the unseen creatures of the air which we breathe, or which, mingling in the fluids we drink, circulate within us unperceived.

An immensely powerful world, which in its details we scorn, but which at intervals affrights us, when it stands revealed before our eyes in one of its grand unforeseen manifestations.

The navigator, for example, who at night sees the ocean shimmering with lustre and wreathing garlands of fire, is at first diverted by the spectacle. He sails ten leagues; the garland is indefinitely prolonged; it stirs, and twists, and knots itself in harmony with the motions of the wave; it becomes a monstrous serpent ever extending its sinuous length to thirty, ay, and forty leagues. Yet all this is but a dance of imperceptible animalcules! What are their numbers? At this question the imagination starts back aghast; it perceives in the distance a nature of gigantic force, of terrific wealth, but possessing little relation to the other, the well-ordered, and, in a certain degree, economical nature, of the higher life.

It is impossible to speak of insects or molluscs without naming these animalcules, which seem to be their rough outline, and in the extreme simplicity of their organism already foretoken, indicate, and prepare for them. With a good microscope you can discern these miniatures of the insect, which simulate their organism, and mimic their movements. When you are able to distinguish the _Rotifers_, you think that in the aggregations and in the tentacles of their mouth you recognize them as little polypes. The _Rhizopods_, though almost imperceptible, are furnished, nevertheless, with good solid carapaces, which are equally as good a protection for them as their great shells are for the molluscs, the oyster and the snail. The microscopic _Tardigradæ_ are, in fact, closely connected with insects, and the _Acarina_ with worms.

What are these least of the little? Simply the architects or builders of the globe which we inhabit. With their bodies and their remains they have prepared the soil now echoing under our feet. Whether their tiny shells be still distinguishable, or whether they have been decomposed into chalk, they are not the less the foundation of immense portions of our earth. A single bed of this chalk stretches from Paris to Tours; that is, for fifty miles. Another, of enormous breadth, spreads over all Champagne. Pure chalk, or Spanish white, which we find everywhere, is composed of pounded shells.

And it is these most minute of organisms which have wrought the grandest of works. The imperceptible rhizopod has built for itself a nobler monument than the Pyramids; nothing less than Central Italy, a notable portion of the chain of the Apennines. But even this was too insignificant: the colossal masses of Chili, the prodigious Cordilleras, which look down upon the world at their feet, are the funeral monument wherein this impalpable--I had almost said invisible-organism has interred the remains of its vanished race.

A bygone world, hidden beneath the present and upper world in the profundities of life or the obscurity of time!

What might it not tell us, if God would give it speech, and permit it to recall all that it has done or is doing for us! What just demands might not the elementary plants, the imperfect animals whose dust has fashioned for our use the fertile crust of the globe, that noble theatre of life, address to us! "While you were still asleep," might say the ferns, "we alone, by transforming and purifying the previously irrespirable air, created after thousands upon thousands of years the earth now blooming with the corn and the rose! We accumulated that subterranean treasure of enormous coal-beds which warms your hearth; and that one mass, among others, a hundred leagues in length, which feeds the great forge of the world from London to Newcastle."

"We," the imperceptibles might say,--the obscure and unnamed animalcules despised or ignored by man,--"we are thy guardians, have laid out thy fields, and built thy dwelling-places. It is not the great fossil rhinoceros or mastodon whose bones have made thy soil; it is _our_ work--or rather, it is ourselves. Thy cities, thy Louvres, and thy Capitols are constructed with our _débris_. Life itself in its essence, in that sparkling beverage by which France diffuses joy over all the earth, whence comes it? From arid hills where the vine thrives in the white dust that once was _we_, and absorbs the concealed warmth of our prior existences."

The demand made upon us would be a lengthened one; restitution impossible. These dead myriads, having nourished with their lime the various articles that form our sustenance, have passed into our very being. Others also would put forth a claim. The very pebble, the hard flint, once lived, and now nourishes life.

Great was the astonishment in Europe when a Berlin professor--Ehrenberg--informed us that the silicious stone, so sharp, rough, and brittle, the _tripoli_ with which metals are polished, is neither more nor less than an aggregation of dead animalcules, an accumulation of the shells of infusoria of a terrible diminutiveness. So small is the creature I speak of, that it takes one hundred and eighty-seven millions to weigh a grain.

The labours of the unseen architects of the globe, admired by our men of science in extinct species, travellers have discovered revived in living species. They have surprised, in our own day, immense laboratories in permanent activity, of beings invisible in themselves, or apparently powerless, but really of boundless capacity of toil, if we judge by its results. What death accomplishes for life, life itself relates. Numbers of tiny organisms become by their present works the interpreters and historians of their vanished predecessors.

These, like the latter, with their structures, or their _débris_, build up islands in the sea, and construct immense banks of reefs, which, gradually joining together, will become new lands. Without going further than Sicily, we find among the madrepores, that cover its coasts torn by volcanic fires, a little animal, the zoophyte, which has accomplished a task man would never have dared to undertake. He contrives to move forward by protecting his soft body with a shield of stone which he incessantly secretes. Continuously developing the tubes which in succession afford him shelter, he entirely fills up the empty spaces left by the madrepores or corals, bridges over the intervals between the reefs, and connects them with one another; finally, he creates a passage in defiles previously impassable. In due time this builder will have accomplished the colossal task of a causeway all around the island in its circumference of a hundred and eighty leagues.

But it is more particularly in the vast Southern Ocean that these works are prosecuted on a grand scale by the polypes of the lime, the corallines, and madrepores of every kind; an animal vegetation worthy of comparison with the labour of the mosses in a peat-moor, which continue to flourish in their upper growth while the lower are transformed and decomposed. Exactly like these vegetables, the polypes, and even their production, the coral, while still soft and tender, frequently become the nourishment of worms and fishes which feed and browse upon them like our cattle, derive their sustenance from them, and return them in the shape of chalk, without the slightest indication of a previous existence! Recently English seamen have discovered at the bottom of the sea this manufacture of chalk, which is incessantly passing from the living into the inorganic condition.

But these destructive causes do not prevent the polypes from imperturbably carrying on their gigantic labours, incessantly elevating the islands and solid barriers which are so skilfully adapted to resist the oceanic action. They divide the work among themselves according to their species. The idlest execute their share in the quiet waters, or in the great depths, remotest from the light; others, under the sunshine, among the very breakers of which they eventually become the masters.

Soft, gelatinous, elastic, adhering to their support, the stony and porous mass; they deaden the fury of the boiling waters which would wear out the granite, and split the rock into fragments.

Under the mild trade-winds which prevail in the tropic climates, the sea would uniformly flow with a tranquil tide if it did not encounter these living ramparts, which force it back upon itself, scatter its waves in spray, and vex it with everlasting torment.

That the waters should assault them is their fate. But they inflict no injury upon them; and in truth it is on their behalf they toil. Their violence does not wear _them_, but it wears the reef, and detaches in atoms the lime on which they live and with which they build. This lime, absorbed by them and _animalized_, changes into a hundred sparkling, living, active flowers, which are identical with our polypes, and form quite an analogous world enamelling the ocean-bed.

On the margin of these islands,--which are generally circular, like a ring,--accumulates a layer of vegetable wealth, which speedily grows green, and embellishes itself with the only tree that can endure salt-water, the cocoa-nut palm. This, then, is the _humus_; the life which will for ever continue to develop. The fresh springs and fountains will next make their appearance, invited and fed by the vegetation.

Such is the original type of a young world which in due time will be inhabited. The cocoa-palm will have its insects; the birds will pause on its boughs; men will gather its fruit. Wrecked ships and floating timbers, propelled by the sea, will bring there after awhile tenants of every kind.

Some of these islands, when extended, enlarged, and solidified, measure not less than twenty-five miles in circumference. Many are larger still; fertile, inhabited, and populous, like the Maldives.

The ambition of their architects might rest contented, you would think, with these vast creations. But to insure their fixity, they have increased their extent. The buttresses by which they strengthen their work at the bottom of the sea being prolonged and elevated, expand into banks, which link the isles to each other over an immense area. Along the line of burning life, in the tropic zone, these indefatigable builders have daringly intersected the sea and worked athwart its currents, and already are arresting the courses of our navigators.

New Caledonia is now surrounded by a reef of 145 leagues in length. The chain of the Maldive Islands measures 480 English miles. To the east of New Holland stretches a bank of polypes over 360 leagues, 127 of these without interruption. Finally, in the Pacific Ocean the mass known as the Dangerous Archipelago is about 400 leagues in length by 150 in breadth.

If they continue after this fashion, incessantly connecting their various piles of submarine masonry, they will perhaps realize the prophecy of Kirby, who discerned in the coral isles and reefs the possibility of a new world--a brilliant and fertile world; and in the course of centuries may accomplish the formation of a causeway, an immense bridge, connecting Asia with America.