whale. He carefully picked it up with his
little finger and, resting it on the nail of his thumb, showed it to
the Sirian, who began laughing for a second time at the ludicrously
small scale of the things on our planet. The Saturnian, persuaded
that our world was inhabited, figured very quickly that it was
inhabited only by whales; and as he was very good at reasoning, he
was determined to infer the origin and evolution of such a small
atom; whether it had ideas, a will, liberty. Micromegas was confused.
He examined the animal very patiently and found no reason to believe
that a soul was lodged in it. The two voyagers were therefore
inclined to believe that there is no spirit in our home, when with
the help of the microscope they perceived something as large as a
whale floating on the Baltic Sea. We know that a flock of
philosophers was at this time returning from the Arctic Circle, where
they had made some observations, which no one had dared make up to
then. The gazettes claimed that their vessel ran aground on the coast
of Bothnia, and that they were having a lot of difficulty setting
things straight; but the world never shows its cards. I am going to
tell how it really happened, artlessly and without bias; which is no
small thing for an historian.

CHAPTER V.

Experiments and reasonings of the two voyagers.

Micromegas slowly reached his hand towards the place where the object
had appeared, extended two fingers, and withdrew them for fear of
being mistaken, then opened and closed them, and skillfully seized
the vessel that carried these fellows, putting it on his fingernail
without pressing it too hard for fear of crushing it.

"Here is a very different animal from the first," said the dwarf from
Saturn.

The Sirian put the so-called animal in the palm of his hand. The
passengers and the crew, who believed themselves to have been lifted
up by a hurricane, and who thought they were on some sort of boulder,
scurried around; the sailors took the barrels of wine, threw them
overboard onto Micromegas hand, and followed after. The geometers
took their quadrants, their sextants, two Lappland girls[1], and
descended onto the Sirian's fingers. They made so much fuss that he
finally felt something move, tickling his fingers. It was a steel-tipped
baton being pressed into his index finger. He judged, by this
tickling, that it had been ejected from some small animal that he was
holding; but he did not suspect an