ancient turf, or the air of a marsh darkened with insects,
will sometimes check our breathing so that we aspire for
cleaner places. But none is clean: the moving sand is
infected with lice; the pure spring, where it bursts out
of the mountain, is a mere issue of worms; even in the
hard rock the crystal is forming.

In two main shapes this eruption covers the counte-
nance of the earth: the animal and the vegetable: one
in some degree the inversion of the other: the second
rooted to the spot; the first coming detached out of its
natal mud, and scurrying abroad with the myriad feet
of insects or towering into the heavens on the wings
of birds: a thing so inconceivable that, if it be well
considered, the heart stops. To what passes with the
anchored vermin, we have little clue, doubtless they
have their joys and sorrows, their delights and killing
agonies: it appears not how. But of the locomotory, to
which we ourselves belong, we can tell more. These
share with us a thousand miracles: the miracles of sight,
of hearing, of the projection of sound, things that bridge
space; the miracles of memory and reason, by which the
present is conceived, and when it is gone, its image kept
living in the brains of man and brute; the miracle of
reproduction, with its imperious desires and staggering
consequences. And to put the last touch upon this
mountain mass of the revolting and the inconceivable,
all these prey upon each other, lives tearing other lives
in pieces, cramming them inside themselves, and by that
summary process, growing fat: the vegetarian, the whale,
perhaps the tree, not less than the lion of the desert; for
the vegetarian is only the eater of the dumb.

Meanwhile our rotatory island loaded with predatory

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