"But," answered the other, "you have pretty weak senses."

"But," replied the dwarf, "this planet is poorly constructed. It is so irregular and has such a ridiculous shape! Everything here seems to be in chaos: you see these little rivulets, none of which run in a straight line, these pools of water that are neither round, nor square, nor oval, nor regular by any measure; all these little pointy specks scattered across the earth that grate on my feet? (This was in reference to mountains.) Look at its shape again, how it is flat at the poles, how it clumsily revolves around the sun in a way that necessarily eliminates the climates of the poles? To tell the truth, what really makes me think it is uninhabited is that it seems that no one of good sense would want to stay."

"Well," said Micromegas, "maybe the inhabitants of this planet are not of good sense! But in the end it looks like this may be for a reason. Everything appears irregular to you here, you say, because everything on Saturn and Jupiter is drawn in straight lines. This might be the[1] reason that you are a bit puzzled here. Have I not told you that I have continually noticed variety in my travels?"

[1] All the editions that precede those of Kehl read: "It might be for this" B.

The Saturnian responded to all these points. The dispute might never have finished if it were not for Micromegas who, getting worked up, had the good luck to break the thread of his diamond necklace. The diamonds fell; they were pretty little carats of fairly irregular size, of which the largest weighed four hundred pounds and the smallest fifty. The dwarf recaptured some of them; bending down for a better look, he perceived that these diamonds were cut with the help of an excellent microscope. So he took out a small microscope of 160 feet in diameter and put it up to his eye; and Micromegas took up one of 2,005 feet in diameter. They were excellent; but neither one of them could see anything right away and had to adjust them. Finally the Saturnian saw something elusive that moved in the shallow waters of the Baltic sea; it was a whale. He carefully picked it up with his little finger and, resting it on the nail of his thumb, showed it to the Sirian, who began laughing for a second time at the ludicrously small scale of the things on our planet. The Saturnian, persuaded that our world was inhabited, figured very quickly that it was inhabited only by whales; and as he was very good at reasoning, he was determined to infer the origin and evolution of such a small atom; whether it had ideas, a will, liberty. Micromegas was confused. He examined the animal very patiently and found no reason to believe that a soul was lodged in it. The two voyagers were therefore inclined to believe that there is no spirit in our home, when with the help of the microscope they perceived something as large as a whale floating on the Baltic Sea. We know that a flock of philosophers was at this time returning from the Arctic Circle, where they had made some observations, which no one had dared make up to then. The gazettes claimed that their vessel ran aground on the coast of Bothnia, and that they were having a lot of difficulty setting things straight; but the world never shows its cards. I am going to tell how it really happened, artlessly and without bias; which is no small thing for an historian.

CHAPTER V.

Experiments and reasonings of the two voyagers.

Micromegas slowly reached his hand towards the place where the object had appeared, extended two fingers, and withdrew them for fear of being mistaken, then opened and closed them, and skillfully seized the vessel that carried these fellows, putting it on his fingernail without pressing it too hard for fear of crushing it.

"Here is a very different animal from the first," said the dwarf from Saturn.

The Sirian put the so-called animal in the palm of his hand. The passengers and the crew, who believed themselves to have been lifted up by a hurricane, and who thought they were on some sort of boulder, scurried around; the sailors took the barrels of wine, threw them overboard onto Micromegas hand, and followed after. The geometers took their quadrants, their sextants, two Lappland girls[1], and descended onto the Sirian's fingers. They made so much fuss that he finally felt something move, tickling his fingers. It was a steel-tipped baton being pressed into his index finger. He judged, by this tickling, that it had been ejected from some small animal that he was holding; but he did not suspect anything else at first. The microscope, which could barely distinguish a whale from a boat, could not capture anything as elusive as a man. I do not claim to outrage anyone's vanity, but I am obliged to ask that important men make an observation here. Taking the size of a man to be about five feet, the figure we strike on Earth is like that struck by an animal of about six hundred thousandths[2] the height of a flea on a ball five feet around. Imagine something that can hold the Earth in its hands, and which has organs in proportion to ours—and it may very well be that there are such things—conceive, I beg of you, what these things would think of the battles that allow a vanquisher to take a village only to lose it later.

[1] See the notes to the speech in verse, "On Moderation" (Volume XII), and those of "Russia to Paris" (Volume XIV). K.

[2] The edition that I take to be original reads "sixty thousandths." B.

I do not doubt that if ever some captain of some troop of imposing grenadiers reads this work he will increase the size of the hats of his troops by at least two imposing feet. But I warn him that it will have been done in vain; that he and his will never grow any larger than infinitely small.

What marvelous skill it must have taken for our philosopher from Sirius to perceive the atoms I have just spoken of. When Leuwenhoek and Hartsoëker tinkered with the first or thought they saw the grains that make us up, they did not by any means make such an astonishing discovery. What pleasure Micromegas felt at seeing these little machines move, at examining all their scurrying, at following them in their enterprises! how he cried out! with what joy he placed one of his microscopes in the hands of his traveling companion!

"I see them," they said at the same time, "look how they are carrying loads, stooping, getting up again." They spoke like that, hands trembling from the pleasure of seeing such new objects, and from fear of losing them. The Saturnian, passing from an excess of incredulity to an excess of credulity, thought he saw them mating.

"Ah!" he said. "I have caught nature in the act"[1]. But he was fooled by appearances, which happens only too often, whether one is using a microscope or not.

[1] j'ai pris la nature sur le fait. A happy, good-natured turn of phrase expressed by Fontenelle upon making some observations of natural history. K.

CHAPTER VI.

What happened to them among men.

Micromegas, a much better observer than his dwarf, clearly saw that the atoms were speaking to each other, and pointed this out to his companion, who, ashamed of being mistaken about them reproducing, did not want to believe that such a species could communicate. He had the gift of language as well as the Sirian. He could not hear the atoms talk, and he supposed that they did not speak. Moreover, how could these impossibly small beings have vocal organs, and what would they have to say? To speak, one must think, more or less; but if they think, they must therefore have the equivalent of a soul. But to attribute the equivalent of a soul to this species seemed absurd to him.

"But," said the Sirian, "you believed