"So fine is the chipping that to see the workmanship a magnifying glass is necessary."
I think that would be absolutely convincing, if there were anything—absolutely anything—either that tiny beings, from pickle to cucumber-stature, made these things, or that ordinary savages made them under magnifying glasses.
The idea that we are now going to develop, or perpetrate, is rather intensely of the accursed, or the advanced. It's a lost soul, I admit—or boast—but it fits in. Or, as conventional as ever, our own method is the scientific method of assimilating. It assimilates, if we think of the inhabitants of Elvera—
By the way, I forgot to tell the name of the giant's world:
Monstrator.
Spindle-shaped world—about 100,000 miles along its major axis—more details to be published later.
But our coming inspiration fits in, if we think of the inhabitants of Elvera as having only visited here: having, in hordes as dense as clouds of bats, come here, upon hunting excursions—for mice, I should say: for bees, very likely—or most likely of all, or inevitably, to convert the heathen here—horrified with anyone who would gorge himself with more than a bean at a time; fearful for the souls of beings who would guzzle more than a dewdrop at a time—hordes of tiny missionaries, determined that right should prevail, determining right by their own minutenesses.
They must have been missionaries.
Only to be is motion to convert or assimilate something else.
The idea now is that tiny creatures coming here from their own little world, which may be Eros, though I call it Elvera, would flit from the exquisite to the enormous—gulp of a fair-sized terrestrial animal—half a dozen of them gone and soon digested. One falls into a brook—torn away in a mighty torrent—