e of internal lungs, when her whole sensitive surface is in
living commerce with the atmosphere that clings to it?

The organ that gives us most trouble is the brain. All the
consciousness we directly know seems tied to brains.--Can there be
consciousness, we ask, where there is no brain? But our brain, which
primarily serves to correlate our muscular reactions with the external
objects on which we depend, performs a function which the earth
performs in an entirely different way. She has no proper muscles or
limbs of her own, and the only objects external to her are the other
stars. To these her whole mass reacts by most exquisite alterations in
its total gait, and by still more exquisite vibratory responses in
its substance. Her ocean reflects the lights of heaven as in a mighty
mirror, her atmosphere refracts them like a monstrous lens, the
clouds and snow-fields combine them into white, the woods and flowers
disperse them into colors. Polarization, interference, absorption,
awaken sensibilities in matter of which our senses are too coarse to
take any note.

For these cosmic relations of hers, then, she no more needs a special
brain than she needs eyes or ears. _Our_ brains do indeed unify and
correlate innumerable functions. Our eyes know nothing of sound, our
ears nothing of light, but, having brains, we can feel sound and light
together, and compare them. We account for this by the fibres which in
the brain connect the optical with the acoustic centre, but just how
these fibres bring together not only the sensations, but the centres,
we fail to see. But if fibres are indeed all that is needed to do that
trick, has not the earth pathways, by which you and I are physically
continuous, more than enough to do for our two minds what the
brain-fibres do for the sounds and sights in a single mind? Must every
higher means of unification between things be a literal _brain_-fibre,
and go by that name? Cannot the earth-mind know otherwise the contents
of our minds together?

Fechner's imagination, insisting on the differences as well as on the
resemblances, thus tries to make our picture of the whole earth's life
more concrete. He revels in the thought of its perfections. To carry
her precious freight through the hours and seasons what form could be
more excellent than hers--being as it is horse, wheels, and wagon all
in one. Think of her beauty--a shining ball, sky-blue and sun-lit over
one half, the other bathed in starr