plant which will become the palm-tree is distinguished from the oak which is in course of formation, and the ancestor of the future bird is already different from that of the fish.  We follow up this great spectacle.  The ages pass, they pass by thousands and by millions, they pass by tens of millions.  We need not be stinting in our allowance of time; our imagination will be tired of conceiving of it sooner than thought of supplying it.  And at what shall we have arrived at last?  At the universe as it has been for some few thousands of years past; at the world with its vegetables of a thousand forms, grouped by classes and series, with the families of animals, with the relations of animals to plants, with the unnumbered harmonies of nature.  Let us choose out one particular, on which to fix our attention.  Shall it be a she-goat—­

     Upstretched on fragrant cytisus to browse?

This will suit our purpose, although the cytisus, unless I am mistaken, has no perfume except in M. de Lamartine’s verses.  Let us fix our attention on a cytisus with its yellow clusters hanging down, and the goat bending its pliant branches as it browses on the foliage.  Here is a very small detail in the ample lap of nature.  Let us come closer, and to help our ignorance, let us provide ourselves with a naturalist who will answer for us the questions suggested by this simple spectacle.  And what have we now before us?  The various relations of the animal’s organization to the vegetables on which it feeds.  In the organization and functions of these two living beings, in the equilibrium and movements of their frames, in the circulation of sap and of blood, we have the application of the most secret laws of mechanism, of physics, and of chemistry.  Then again, in the relations which the animal and the plant sustain with the ground which bears them, with the air they breathe, with the sun which enlightens them, with heat and light, with the moisture of the air and its electricity—­in all this we see the universal relations which connect all the various parts of the wide universe with each one of its minutest details.  In this simple spectacle we have, in fact, reciprocal relations, the balance of things, the harmony which maintains the universal life—­intelligence, in short, in the organization of beings, in the characteristics which divide them, in the classes which unite them, in the relations of these classes amongst themselves;—­wonders of intelligent design, of which the sciences we are so proud of are spelling out, letter by letter, line after line, the inexhaustible abysses:  this is what we find everywhere.  Let us now come back to our primitive cellules.