like the earth; others, like the moon, stable in desolation. All of these
we take to be made of something we call matter: a thing which no analysis
can help us to conceive; to whose incredible properties no familiarity can
reconcile our minds. This stuff, when not purified by the lustration of
fire, rots uncleanly into something we call life; seized through all its
atoms with a pediculous malady; swelling in tumors that become
independent, sometimes even (by an abhorrent prodigy) locomotory; one
splitting into millions, millions cohering into one, as the malady
proceeds through varying stages. This vital putrescence of the dust, used
as we are to it, yet strikes us with occasional disgust; and the profusion
of worms in a piece of 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 countenance 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 w