! you will come back to it!"

"Perhaps so. But what were we to think of a book in which it is
pretended that the light was created before the sun? as if the sun were
not the sole cause of light!"

"You forget the light which we call boreal," said the ecclesiastic.

Bouvard, without answering this point, strongly denied that light could
be on one side and darkness on the other, that evening and morning could
have existed when there were no stars, or that the animals made their
appearance suddenly, instead of being formed by crystallisation.

As the walks were too narrow, while gesticulating, they trod on the
flower-borders. Langlois took a fit of coughing.

The captain exclaimed: "You are revolutionaries!"

Girbal: "Peace! peace!"

The priest: "What materialism!"

Foureau: "Let us rather occupy ourselves with our chasuble!"

"No! let me speak!" And Bouvard, growing more heated, went on to say
that man was descended from the ape!

All the vestrymen looked at each other, much amazed, and as if to assure
themselves that they were not apes.

Bouvard went on: "By comparing the foetus of a woman, of a bitch, of a
bird, of a frog----"

"Enough!"

"For my part, I go farther!" cried Pecuchet. "Man is descended from the
fishes!"

There was a burst of laughter. But without being disturbed:

"The _Telliamed_--an Arab book----"

"Come, gentlemen, let us hold our meeting."

And they entered the sacristy.

The two comrades had not given the Abbe Jeufroy such a fall as they
expected; therefore, Pecuchet found in him "the stamp of Jesuitism." His
"boreal light," however, caused them uneasiness. They searched for it in
Orbigny's manual.

"This is a hypothesis to explain why the vegetable fossils of Baffin's
Bay resemble the Equatorial plants. We suppose, in place of the sun, a
great luminous source of heat which has now disappeared, and of which
the Aurora Borealis is but perhaps a vestige."

Then a doubt came to them as to what proceeds from man, and, in their
perplexity, they thought of Vaucorbeil.

He had not followed up his threats. As of yore, he passed every morning
before their grating, striking all the bars with his walking-stick one
after the other.

Bouvard watched him, and, having stopped him, said he wanted to submit
to him a curious point in anthropology.

"Do you believe that the human race is descended from fishes?"

"What nonsense!"

"From apes rather--isn't that so?"

"Directly, that is