s he reached a large
closet--final triumph of human skill, originality, wealth, and splendor,
in which there hung a large, square mahogany coffer, suspended from a
nail by a silver chain.

"Ah, _monsieur_ keeps the key of it," said the stout assistant
mysteriously. "If you wish to see the portrait, I will gladly venture to
tell him."

"Venture!" said the young man; "then is your master a prince?"

"I don't know what he is," the other answered. Equally astonished, each
looked for a moment at the other. Then construing the stranger's silence
as an order, the apprentice left him alone in the closet.

Have you never launched into the immensity of time and space as you read
the geological writings of Cuvier? Carried by his fancy, have you hung
as if suspended by a magician's wand over the illimitable abyss of the
past? When the fossil bones of animals belonging to civilizations before
the Flood are turned up in bed after bed and layer upon layer of the
quarries of Montmartre or among the schists of the Ural range, the
soul receives with dismay a glimpse of millions of peoples forgotten
by feeble human memory and unrecognized by permanent divine tradition,
peoples whose ashes cover our globe with two feet of earth that yields
bread to us and flowers.

Is not Cuvier the great poet of our era? Byron has given admirable
expression to certain moral conflicts, but our immortal naturalist has
reconstructed past worlds from a few bleached bones; has rebuilt cities,
like Cadmus, with monsters' teeth; has animated forests with all the
secrets of zoology gleaned from a piece of coal; has discovered a giant
population from the footprints of a mammoth. These forms stand erect,
grow large, and fill regions commensurate with their giant size. He
treats figures like a poet; a naught set beside a seven by him produces
awe.

He can call up nothingness before you without the phrases of a
charlatan. He searches a lump of gypsum, finds an impression in it, says
to you, "Behold!" All at once marble takes an animal shape, the dead
come to life, the history of the world is laid open before you. After
countless dynasties of giant creatures, races of fish and clans of
mollusks, the race of man appears at last as the degenerate copy of a
splendid model, which the Creator has perchance destroyed. Emboldened
by his gaze into the past, this petty race, children of yesterday,
can overstep chaos, can raise a psalm without end, and outline for
thems