Micromégas V

 by François-Marie Arouet

CHAPTER V

Experiments and Reasonings of the Two Voyagers

                                   


   The Saturnian stretched out his hand, seized with great dexterity the ship which carried those gentlemen, and placed it in the hollow of his hand without squeezing it too much, for fear of crushing it. "Here is an animal quite different from the first," he observed.

   The passengers and crew, who thought a tempest had whirled them aloft, and supposed they had struck upon some kind of rock, began to stir; the sailors seized casks of wine, threw them overboard on the Saturnian's hand, then jumped down themselves, while the geometers seized their quadrants, their sectors, and a pair of Lapland girls, and descended on the Saturnian's fingers. They made such a commotion that at last he felt a tickle—a pole with an iron point being driven a foot deep into his forefinger. He surmised that this prick proceeded somehow from the little animal he was holding, but at first he perceived nothing more than minute specks, which he guessed to be turds, spilling away from the creature.

   I have no wish to shock anyone's vanity, but I must beg those who are sensitive about their own importance to consider what I have to say on this subject. Taking the average stature of mankind at five feet, we make no greater figure on Earth than an insect not quite one 200,000th of an inch in height on a bowl 10 feet around. Imagine a being who could hold Earth in his hands and who had organs of sense proportionate to our own—there are in fact many such beings—and consider what they would think of those battles which give the conqueror possession of some village, to be lost again soon after.

   No doubt some captain of tall grenadiers will read this work and raise the caps of his company a couple of feet, but I warn him, it will be all in vain, he and his men will never be anything but the merest mites.

   It was not until both Sirian and Saturnian examined the "turds" with microscopes that they realized the amazing truth. When Leeuwenhoek and Hartsoeker first saw, or thought they saw, the minute speck out of which we are formed, they did not make nearly so surprising a discovery. What pleasure Micromégas and the dwarf felt in watching the movements of those little machines, in examining their feats, in following their operations! How they shouted with joy!

   "I see them!" they exclaimed both at once. "Do you not observe how they are carrying burdens, how they stoop down and rise up?"

   As they spoke, their hands trembled with delight at beholding objects so unusual, and with fear lest they lose them. The Saturnian, passing from extreme skepticism to utter credulity, fancied he saw them engaged in the work of propagation.

   "Ah!" said he, "I have surprised nature in the very act."

   But he was deceived by appearances, an accident to which we are only too liable, whether using microscopes or not.

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Micromégas IV

 by François-Marie Arouet

CHAPTER IV

What Happened on Planet Earth

                               


   After resting, they consumed for breakfast a couple of mountains. Then wishing to inspect the countryside, they first went from north to south. Each of the Sirian's ordinary steps was about 30,000 statute feet; the Saturnian dwarf, whose height was only a thousand fathoms, followed panting far behind, for he had to take 20 steps when the other made a single stride. Picture to yourself a tiny little toy spaniel pursuing a captain of the King of Prussia's grenadiers!

   The strangers proceeded quickly, circling the globe in 36 hours; the Sun, indeed, or rather the Earth, makes the same journey in a day, but it is much easier to turn on one's axis than to walk on one's feet. Behold our travelers, then, returned to the same spot from which they had started, after having set eyes upon that sea, to them almost imperceptible, called the Mediterranean, and that other little pond which, under the name of the great Ocean, surrounds this molehill. Therein the dwarf had never sunk much above the knee, while the other had scarcely wetted his ankle. They did all they could, searching here and there, to ascertain whether Earth was inhabited. They stooped, lay down, and groped about in all directions, but their eyes and hands being out of all proportion to the tiny beings who crawl up and down here, they felt not the slightest sensation which could lead them to suspect that we and our fellow creatures have the honor to exist.

   The dwarf hastily declared there was not a single creature on this planet. His first reason was that he had not seen one. But Micromégas politely explained that that was not a good argument:

   "For," said he, "you, with your little eyes, cannot see certain stars of the 50th magnitude which I distinctly discern; do you conclude that those stars have no existence?"

   "But," argued the dwarf, "this globe is so ill-constructed, so irregular, and so ridiculously shaped! All here appears chaotic, look at these little brooks, not one of which goes in a straight line, and these ponds, which are neither round, square, oval, nor of any regular form, and all these little bristles which have rubbed the skin off my feet!"—he alluded to the trees—"Observe too the shape of the globe as a whole, how it is flat at the poles, how it turns around the Sun in a clumsily slanting manner, so that the polar climes are mere wastes. In truth, what chiefly makes me think there is nobody here, is that I cannot suppose any sensible people should wish to occupy such a dwelling."

   "Well," said Micromégas, "perhaps the people who inhabit it are not sensible. But there are in fact signs of its not having been made for nothing. Everything here seems irregular, you say, but you judge by the standards of Saturn and Jupiter. Have I not told you that in the course of my travels I have always found variety?"

   The Saturnian had answers to these arguments, and the dispute might never have ended, had not he suddenly spied what seemed to him a small tadpole moving half underwater in the Baltic sea. Actually, it was a whale. He caught it cleverly with his little finger, and placing it on his thumbnail, showed it to the Sirian, who burst out laughing a second time at the extreme minuteness of the inhabitants of our system.

   The Saturnian, now convinced our world was inhabited, immediately concluded that whales were the only creatures to be found here, and, as speculation was his strong point, made conjectures about the origin of so insignificant an atom, the source of its movement, and whether it had ideas and free will. Micromégas drew a magnifying glass from his bundle of instruments, examined the creature patiently, and found no evidence that it had a soul lodged in its body. The two travelers then suspected there were no intelligent beings in this habitation of ours, when at last they noticed something as big as a whale, floating on the Baltic sea.

   We know that at that very time, a flock of philosophers was returning from the polar circle, where they had gone to make observations no one had attempted before. The newspapers say their vessel ran aground in the gulf of Bothnia, and that they had great difficulty saving their lives, but we never know in this world the real truth about anything. I will relate honestly what occurred, without adding anything of my own invention—a task which demands no small effort on the part of a historian.

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Micromégas III

by François-Marie Arouet

CHAPTER III

Voyage of the Two Inhabitants of Sirius and Saturn

 

                                                                                                               Illustration by Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès

   Our two philosophers were ready to embark upon the atmosphere of Saturn, with a fine collection of scientific instruments, when the Saturnian's mistress, who had heard what he was up to, came in tears to remonstrate with him. She was a pretty little brunette, barely 660 fathoms high, but her agreeable manners amply atoned for that deficiency.

   "Oh, cruel one!" she exclaimed, "after having resisted you for 1,500 years, and when I was at last beginning to surrender, and have passed scarcely a hundred years in your arms, to leave me thus, and start on a long journey with a giant of another world! Go, you have no taste for anything but novelty, you have never felt true love, were you a real Saturnian, you would be constant. Whither away so fast? What would you have? Our five moons are less fickle than you, our ring less changeable. So much for the past! I will never love again."

   The philosopher embraced her, and, in spite of all his philosophy, joined his tears with hers. As to the lady, after having fainted away, she consoled herself with a certain beau who lived in the neighborhood.

   Meanwhile our two inquirers commenced their travels, they first jumped onto Saturn's ring, which they found pretty flat, as an illustrious inhabitant of our little globe has cleverly conjectured, thence they easily made their way from moon to moon. A comet passed near the last one, so they sprang upon it, along with their instruments. When they had gone about 150,000,000 leagues, they came across the satellites of Jupiter. They landed on Jupiter itself, and remained there a year, during which they learned some very remarkable secrets which would now be appearing in the press, were it not for certain censors who find them too hard to swallow.

   Leaving Jupiter, our explorers crossed a space of about 100,000,000 leagues, and, coasting along the planet Mars, which, as is well known, is five times smaller than our own little globe, they saw two moons. These have escaped the observation of our astronomers. I am well aware that Father Castel will write, and pleasantly enough too, against the existence of these two moons, but I believe those who reason from analogy. Those excellent philosophers know how difficult it would be for Mars, which is so distant from the Sun, to get by with less than two moons. Be that as it may, our friends found the planet so small they were afraid of finding no room there to put up for the night, so they proceeded on their way, like a pair of travelers who disdain a humble village inn, and push on to the nearest town. But the Sirian and his companion soon repented this decision, for they went a long time without finding anything at all.

   At last they perceived a faint glimmer, it came from our Earth, and created compassion in the minds of those who had so lately left Jupiter. However, for fear of repenting a second time, they decided to disembark. They passed over the tail of the comet, and with the aid with an aurora borealis close at hand, alighted on Earth by the northern shore of the Baltic Sea, July 5, 1737.

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Micromégas II

by François-Marie Arouet

CHAPTER II

Conversation Between the Inhabitant of Sirius
and that of Saturn

  

                                                                                                                                                                                                            

                                                 Illustration by Athanasius Kircher (1671)

   One day, after the Sirian had laid down and the secretary had approached his face to facilitate conversation, Micromégas said, "I must confess that nature is full of variety."

   "Yes," said the Saturnian, "nature is like a flower-bed, the blossoms of which—"

   "Oh," said the other, "have done with your flower-bed!"

   "She is," resumed the secretary, "like an assembly of blondes and brunettes, whose attire—"

   "No, no," said the traveler. "Nature is like nature. Why do you search for comparisons?"

   "To please you," answered the secretary.

   "I do not want to be pleased," rejoined the traveler, "I want to be instructed, begin by telling me how many senses the men in your world possess."

   "We have 72," said the academician, "and we are always complaining that they are so few. Our imagination soars beyond our needs, we find that with our 72 senses, our ring, and our five moons, that our range is too restricted, and, in spite of all our curiosity and the tolerably large number of passions which spring out of our 72 senses, we often feel bored."

   "I can well believe it," said Micromégas, "for on our globe, though we have nearly a thousand senses, there lingers even in us a certain vague desire, an unaccountable restlessness, which warns us that we are of little account in the universe, and that there are beings much more perfect than ourselves. I have traveled, I have seen mortals far below us, and others greatly superior, but I have seen none who have not more desires than real wants, and more wants than they can satisfy. I shall someday, perhaps, reach the country where there is lack of nothing, but hitherto no one has been able to give me any positive information about it." The Saturnian and the Sirian thereupon exhausted themselves with ingenious yet futile conjectures on the subject, but were eventually obliged to return to facts.

   "How long do you people live?" asked the Sirian.

   "Ah! a very short time," replied the little man of Saturn.

   "So too with us," said the Sirian. "We are always complaining of the shortness of life. This must be a universal law of nature."

   "Alas!" quoth the Saturnian, "none of us live more than 500 annual revolutions of the Sun." (That amounts to about 15,000 years, according to our manner of counting.) "You see how it is our fate to die almost as soon as we are born, our existence is a point, our duration an instant, our globe an atom. Scarcely have we begun to acquire a little information when death arrives before we can put it to use. I myself do not venture to lay any schemes, I feel like a drop of water in a boundless ocean. I am ashamed, especially before you, of the absurd figure I make in this universe."

   Micromégas answered: "Were you not a philosopher, I should fear to distress you by telling you our lives are 700 times as long as yours, but you know too well that when the time comes to give back one's body to the elements, and reanimate nature under another form—the process called death—when that moment of metamorphosis comes, it is precisely the same whether we have lived an eternity or only a day. I have been in countries where life is a thousand times longer than with us, and yet have heard murmurs of its brevity even there. But people of good sense exist everywhere, who know how to make the most of what they have, and to thank the Author of nature. He has spread over this universe abundant variety, together with a kind of admirable uniformity. For example, all thinking beings are different, yet resemble each other in the common endowment of thought and will. Matter is infinitely extended, but has different properties in different worlds. How many of these various properties do you reckon in the matter with which you are acquainted?"

   "If you speak," replied the Saturnian, "of those properties without which we believe this globe could not subsist as it is, we count 300 of them, such as extension, impenetrability, mobility, gravitation, divisibility, etc."

   "Apparently," rejoined the traveler, "this small number is sufficient for the Creator's purpose in constructing this little habitation. I admire His wisdom throughout, I see differences everywhere, but everywhere also a due proportion. Your globe is small, you who inhabit it are small likewise, you have few senses, the matter comprising your world has few properties, all this is the work of Providence. What color is your sun when carefully examined?"

   "White deeply tinged with yellow," said the Saturnian, "and when we split up one of its rays, it consists of seven colors."

   "Our sun has a reddish light," said the Sirian, "and we have 39 primary colors. There is not a single sun, among all those I have approached, which resembles any other, just as among yourselves there is not a single face which is not different from all the rest."

   After several other questions of this kind, he inquired how many modes of existence essentially different were enumerated on Saturn. He was told that not more than 30 were distinguished, as God, space, matter, beings occupying space which feel and think, thinking beings which do not occupy space, those which possess penetrability, others which do not, etc. The Sirian, in whose world they count 300 of them, and who had discovered 3,000 more in the course of his travels, astonished the philosopher of Saturn. At length, after having communicated to each other a little of what they knew, and a great deal of that about which they knew nothing, and after having exercised their reasoning powers during a complete revolution of the Sun, they resolved to make a little exploratory tour together.

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Micromégas I

by François-Marie Arouet

CHAPTER I

Voyage of an Inhabitant of the Sirius Star to the Planet Saturn

          

                               

 

 

   On a planet revolving around the star Sirius there lived a young man of great intelligence, whose acquaintance I had the honor of making during his recent visit to our little anthill. He was called Micromégas, an appropriate name for great people. He had a stature of eight leagues, or 24,000 geometrical paces of five feet each, or 120,000 statute feet.

   We earthmen have an average stature hardly more than five feet—one pace—so Mr. Micromégas' world must in turn have a circumference 24,000 times greater than our little Earth. Nothing in nature is simpler, more a matter of course. The dominions of certain potentates in Germany or Italy, around which you can walk in half an hour, compared with the empires of Turkey, Russia, or China can give but a faint idea of the vast disparity Nature has set between different orders of being throughout the universe.

   Given his Excellency's height, any sculptor or painter would agree his waist should, proportionally, be about 50,000 feet around. His nose being one third the length of his handsome face, and his handsome face being one seventh the height of his handsome body, it follows that the Sirian's nose is some 5,714 statute feet long.

   His mind rivals the most cultivated among us, he knows many things, some of which are his own inventions. He had not yet reached his 250th year, and was studying, as was customary at his age, at the most famous school on the planet, when he solved 50 propositions of Euclid—18 more than Blaise Pascal, who, after having, according to his sister's account, solved 32 for his own amusement, became a pretty fair geometer, and a very poor metaphysician. When Micromégas was about 450 years old, and already passing out of childhood, he dissected, with the aid of powerful microscopes, many little insects less than 100 feet in diameter; he wrote an interesting book about them, which got him into trouble.

   The mufti of that country, much given to hair-splitting and very ignorant, found in his work statements they deemed suspicious, offensive, rash, and heretical, and they prosecuted him with bitter animosity. The question in dispute was whether the substantial form of which the fleas of Sirius consisted was of the same nature as that of the snails. Micromégas defended himself spiritedly, and had all the ladies on his side, the trial lasted 220 years. At last the mufti had the book condemned by judges who had never read it, and the author was forbidden to appear at court for 800 years.

   He was only moderately afflicted at being banished from a court full of trickery and meanness. He composed a very funny song ridiculing the mufti, which in turn failed to give the latter much annoyance, and he himself set forth on his travels from planet to planet, with a view to improving his mind and soul, as the saying goes.

   Those who travel only in coaches will doubtless be astonished at the sort of conveyance adopted up there, for we, on our little mound of mud, can imagine nothing beyond our own experience. Our traveler had such a marvelous acquaintance with the laws of gravitation, and all the forces of attraction and repulsion, and made such good use of his knowledge, that, sometimes by means of a sunbeam, and sometimes with the help of a comet, he went from one world to another as a bird hops from bough to bough. He traversed the Milky Way in a short time, and I am obliged to confess that he never saw, beyond the stars with which it is thickly sown, that beautiful celestial empyrean which the illustrious parson, Derham, boasts of having discovered at the end of his telescope. Not that I would for a moment suggest Mr. Derham mistook what he saw, Heaven forbid! But Micromégas was on the spot, he is an accurate observer, and I have no wish to contradict anybody.

   Micromégas, after plenty of turns and twists, arrived at the planet Saturn. Accustomed though he was to the sight of novelties, when he saw the insignificant size of the globe and its inhabitants, he could not at first refrain from that smile of superiority which sometimes escapes even the wisest, for in truth Saturn is scarcely 900 times greater than Earth, and the citizens of that country are mere dwarfs, only a thousand fathoms high, or thereabout. He laughed a little at first at these people, in much the same way an Italian musician, when he comes to France, derides Lulli's performances. But, being a sensible fellow, the Sirian was soon convinced that a thinking being need not be altogether ridiculous because he is only 6,000 feet high. He was soon on familiar terms with the Saturnians after their astonishment had somewhat subsided. He formed a close friendship with the secretary of the Academy of Saturn, a man of great intelligence, who had not indeed invented anything himself, but excelled at describing the inventions of others, and who could turn a little verse neatly enough or perform an elaborate calculation.

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