eternal and immutable; the celestial bodies are eminently susceptible of evolution, slow indeed with that we observe on the surface of our globe; but this disproportion, corresponding to the immensity of time and of cosmic spaces as compared with terrestrial measurements, should not mislead us as to the fundamental analogy of the phenomena.
§ 1. The Movement of Particles and Molecules
in Brute Bodies.
It is not only in celestial spaces that we must
search for that mobility of brute matter which imitates
the mobility of living matter. In order to find it we
have only to look about us, or to inquire from
physicists and chemists.
As far as geologists are concerned, M. le Dantec tells us somewhere of one who divided minerals into living rocks—rocks capable of change of structure, of evolution under the influence of atmospheric causes; and dead rocks—rocks which, like clay, have found at the end of all their changes a final state of repose. Jerome Cardan, a celebrated scientist of the sixteenth century, at once mathematician, naturalist, and physician, declared not only that stones live, but that they suffer from disease, grow old, and die. The jewellers of the present day use similar language of certain precious stones; the torquoise, for example.
The alchemists carried these ideas to an extreme. It is not necessary here to recall the past, to evoke the hermetic beliefs and the dreams of the alchemists, who held that the different kinds of matter lived, developed, and were transmuted into each other.
