CHAPTER III.

THE ATOM.

From the bottom of his nets a fisherman one day gave me three almost dying creatures, a sea hedge-hog, a sea star, and another star, a pretty ophiure, which still moved and soon lost its delicate arms. I gave them some sea water, but forgot them for two days, and when I again saw them, all were dead. On the surface of the water a thick gelatinous film had formed. I took an atom of this on the point of a needle; that atom, when placed under the microscope, showed me the following scene. A whirling crowd of short, thick, strongly built animals--_Kolpodes_--rushed to and fro as though intoxicated with their sense of life, delighted, I may say, that they were born and keeping their birthday with a perfectly bacchanalian joy, while microscopic eels--_Vibrions_--swam less than vibrated to spring forward.

Wearied with the contemplation of such movement, the eye, however, soon remarked, that all was not in motion, there were some vibrions yet stiff and still, and there were some intertwined in heaps which had not yet detached themselves and which looked as though expecting the moment of their deliverance.

In that living fermentation of still motionless creatures, the disorderly Kolpodes rushed and raged, hither and thither, regaling and fattening themselves at will.

And this grand spectacle was displayed within the compass of an atom of film taken on the point of a needle! How many such scenes would be enacted in the whole of the gelatinous film which had so promptly formed on the surface of the water containing three dead creatures! The time had been wonderfully put to profit. In two days the dead had made a world; for three animals that I had lost I had gained millions, abounding in youth, absorbed in a real fury of new life!

That infinite world of life which every where surrounds us was almost unknown until lately. Swammerdam and others, who formerly recognized it, were stopped at their first step; and it was as lately as the year 1830, that the magician Uhrenberg looked, revealed, and classified it. He studied the figure of these invisibles, their organization, their manners; he saw them absorb, digest, chase, and fiercely battle. Their generation remained a mystery to him. What is the nature of their amours? _Have_ they any amours? For creatures so elementary, would nature go to the expense of a complicated generation? Or do they spring up spontaneously, and, in vulgar phrase, "like mushrooms?"

A great question! at which more than one naturalist smiles and shakes his head. One is so certain of having solved the great mystery of the world and secured, laid down, once and forever, the true laws of life! It is for Nature to obey! When, a hundred years ago, Réaumur was told that the female silk worm could produce alone and without the male, he denied it in the brief phrase--"Out of nothing, nothing comes." But the fact, often denied but always proved, is now thoroughly established and admitted, not only as to the silk worm, but as to the bee, certain butterflies, and still other creatures.

In all times, in every nation, both the learned and unlearned have said, "Out of death cometh life." It was especially supposed that the imperceptible animalculæ immediately sprang up from the wrecks of death. Even Harvey, who first laid down the law of generation, did not venture to contradict that ancient belief, for though he said every body comes from the egg, he immediately added--_or from the dissolved body of a preceding life_.

It is precisely the theory which has been so brilliantly revived by the experiments of M. Ponchet. He has established the fact that from the remains of the infusoriæ and other creatures, there proceeds a fecund jelly, the "prolific membrane" from which spring, not new beings, indeed, but the germs, the eggs from which new creatures will spring.

We live in an age of miracles. This is not to astonish us. Any one would formerly have been laughed at who had ventured to say that some animals, disobedient to the general laws of nature, take the liberty to breathe through their paws. The noble labors of Milne Edwards have brought this to light. And Cuvier and Blainville had observed, it is said, that other creatures, destitute of the regular organs of circulation, supply their place by the intestines, but those great naturalists deemed the fact so enormous and so incredible, that they did not venture to publish it. It is now perfectly established by Milne Edwards, M. de Quatrefages, &c.

Whatever may be thought of their birth, our atoms, when once born, present a world infinitely and admirably varied. All forms of life are there honorably represented. If they know themselves, they must consider that they compose among themselves a harmony so complete as to leave but little to desire.

They are not dispersed species, created apart; they clearly form a kingdom in which the various species have organized a great division of the vital labor. They have collective beings like our polypus or coral insect, engaged in the servitude of a common life; and they have their minute molluscs which already display their minute and delicate shells; they have their swiftly swimming fish and whirling insects, proud crustaceæ, miniatures of the future crabs, armed, like them, to the teeth; warrior, atoms that chase and devour inoffensive atoms.

And all this in an enormous and marvellous abundance, which shows the comparative poverty of our visible world. Without speaking of those Rhizopodes which have made their part of the Apennines and the Cordilleras,--the Foramineferes, alone, that numerous tribe of shelled atoms, amount, according to Charles d'Orbigny, to two thousand species. They are contemporary with every age of the earth; they present themselves at all the various depths of our thirty crises of the globe; sometimes varying a little in form, but always existing as species; identical witnesses of the life of the earth. In the present day the cold current from the south pole which the point of America cuts in two, sends forty species towards La Plata and forty towards Chili. But the great scene of their creation and organization appears to be the warm stream of the sea which flows from the Antilles. The northern currents kill them. The great paternal torrent drifts myriads of their dead to Newfoundland in our ocean, whose bottom is paved with them.

When the illustrious godfather of the atoms, Ehrenberg, baptised them and introduced them to the scientific world, he was accused of being too favorable to them, and of exaggerating the character of those little creatures. He declared them to be a complicated and elevated organization. So liberally did he endow them, that he gave them a hundred and twenty stomachs. The visible world became jealous of these invisibles, and, by a violent reaction, Dujardin reduced them to the lowest degree of simplicity. The asserted organs he treated as mere appearances; but, as he could not deny their obvious and great powers of absorption, he granted them the gift of being able to improvise stomachs proportioned to what they had to swallow. M. Pouchet does not coincide with this opinion, but rather inclines to that of Ehrenberg.

What is incontestable and admirable in these atoms is the vigor of movement.

Many have all the appearance of a precocious individuality. They do not long remain subject to the communistic life led by their immediate superiors, the true Polypes. Very many of these invisibles are individuals at the first leap; that is to say, that, at the first moment of their existence, they can come and go alone and at their own will; true citizens of the world whose movements depend only upon themselves.

Whatever can be seen or imagined of various modes of locomotion in the visible world, is equalled, even surpassed, among these invisibles. The impetuous whirl of a potent star, of a sun which attracts around him, as his planets, the weaker one which he meets, the more irregular course of the eccentric comet, the graceful undulation of the slender one in the water or upon the land, the rocking barque that veers right round in an instant, the rush of the swift shark and the slow crawl of the wretched sloth--all and every movement, clumsy or graceful, slow or swift, is to be found in the various species of atoms. And with what a marvellous simplicity of machinery! Here you see one, a mere thread, advancing, twisting, a veritable elastic cork-screw; there you see one that for oar and rudder has only an undulating tail or a pair of little vibrating eye-lashes. The beautiful little polypus-worms, like flowers in a vase, anchor together upon an isle--a little plant, or a miniature crab, and then separate and cast off by detaching their delicate peduncle.

What is even more surprising than the organs of motion, is what we may term the expression, the attitudes, the original signs of character and temper. You may recognize here the apathetic, there the vivacious and fantastic, some all alert for war, and others, as it would seem, fretful and agitated without any apparent cause. Again, you will occasionally see a whole crowd of remarkably quiet and peaceable atoms suddenly dispersed and knocked over by some scapegrace atom, conscious of superior strength, and spoiling for a fight.

A prodigious comedy is that of our atoms! They seem to be satirically rehearsing the various farces which are played in our own noble and serious world, of atoms of larger growth!

At the head of the infusoriæ, we must make respectful mention of the majestic giants, the highest type of motion and of strength, slow, but terrible and great.

Take some moss from a roof, steep it for a few hours in water, then place it under the microscopic inspection, and you behold a vast, a mighty animal, the elephant or the whale of the invisibles, moving with a youthful grace which those large animals do not always display. Respect this king of all the atoms, this rotifer, so called because on either side of his head he has a wheel; these wheels are his organs of locomotion, like the paddle-wheels of a steamship, or perhaps they also serve him as his arms of chase to catch his small game, the inferior and peaceable atoms! All fly, all yield to the rotifer, save one; one atom only fears nothing, yields nothing, but trusts to his superior weapons. He is a monster, but he is provided with superior senses. He has two great gleaming, purplish eyes. He is slow, but he can see, and he is admirably armed. To his strong paws he adds strong, sharp talons, which serve him to hold on with, and, at need, to serve him in the fight.

Potent initial essays of Nature, that with such small expenditure of matter, can create in such majestic fashion! Sublime first note of the sublime overture. These,--of what consequence is mere size?--have a colossal power of absorption and of movement, far beyond that which will be given to the enormous animals that are classed so much higher in the animal scale.

The oyster fixed upon its rock, the crawling slug, are to the rotifers creatures as disproportioned as man to the Alps or Cordilleras--so disproportioned that one cannot compare them by glance, hardly by reflection and calculation. Yet among those animal mountains, where will you find the vivacity, the ardor of vitality, displayed by the rotifer? What a fall we have as we ascend! Our atoms are too vivacious, dazzlingly agile, and these gigantic beasts are smitten with paralysis. What if the rotifer could conceive, for instance, the superb, the colossal starred sponge, which one may see in the Museum at Paris? It is to the rotifer what this globe, with its twenty-seven thousand miles of circumference is to man. Well! If the rotifer could compare himself to the huge sponge, rely upon it that the rotifer would move his wheels in utmost excitement, and exclaim--"I am great."

Ah! Rotifer, rotifer! we should despise no one, and nothing.

I am well convinced of your advantages and your superiority. But who knows if the captive and slumbering life which you, for instance, despise in the oyster or the snail, or the slug, be not in truth a progress? Your wild vertiginous movement, and vivacity, by no means secure a passage towards higher destinies; for that passage, nature prefers a motion of less enchantment. She enters the dark sepulchre of that melancholy communism in which element reckons but for little; she teaches how to dominate individual anxieties and ambitions, and to concentrate substances for the benefit of superior lives.

She sleeps there, for a time, like the _Sleeping Beauty in the Wood_. But sleep, captivity, enchantment, be it what it may, it is not Death. In the sponge, seemingly so dead, what life there is! It moves not, breathes not, has no organs of circulation, or of sense,--and yet it lives. How know we that, do you ask? Twice in every year the sponge reproduces. She lives after her fashion, and even more richly than many others. At the proper day, small spheres leave the mother sponge, armed with minute fins, which enable them for a short time to float about in full liberty, but soon coming to anchor, they remain there, growing, reproducing, till the sponge-hunter carries them to the habitations of man, to the service of the greater enslaver, man, the civilized.

Thus, in the apparent absence of senses, and of all organization, in that mysterious enigma, at the doubtful threshold of life, generation opens up to us the visible world by which we are to ascend. As yet there is nothing, and in the bosom of that nothingness maternity already appears. As with the fabled gods of antique and mysterious Egypt, as with that old Isis and Osiris, who begat before their birth, here, also, Love exists before Being.