The little man did not appear as if he were going to reply to me but, taking up the thread of his discourse, he was about to continue when I interrupted him once more. I asked him in what world we were breathing, if it were thickly inhabited and by what sort of government order was maintained.
"I will reveal to you", he replied, "secrets which are not known in your climate. Look carefully at the ground on which we walk; a little while ago it was a confused and disordered mass, a chaos of intricate matter, a black and slimy dross thrown off by the Sun. After it had mingled, pressed and made compact these numerous clouds of atoms by the vigour of the rays still cast forth; after, I say, a long and powerful maturation had separated in this ball the most contrary bodies and united the most similar, this mass was so provoked by heat and sweated so much that it caused a deluge, which covered it more than forty days; for that space of time was fully needed by so much water to flow into the lowest and most sloping parts of our globe.
"From these united torrents of water was formed the sea, whose salt still proves that it must be a mass of sweat, since all sweat is salt. Following upon the retreat of the waters there remained on this earth a fat and fertile mud, and when the Sun shone upon it it rose like a blister, which cannot cast out its germ on account of the cold. It then received another maturation and this maturation rectified and perfected it by a more exact mixture and thereby the germ, which was only able hitherto to vegetate, was rendered capable of sentience. But the waters, which had settled so long on the mud, had chilled it too much and the pimple did not burst; and so the Sun heated it up once more. After the third digestion this womb was so heated that the cold no longer made an obstacle to its delivery: it opened and brought forth a man who has retained in his liver (which is the seat of the vegetative soul and the place of first maturation) the power of multiplying; in his heart (which is the seat of activity and the place of the second maturation) vital power: and in the brain (which is the seat of the intellect and the place of the third maturation) the power of reasoning. Otherwise, why should we be longer in the belly of our mothers than all other animals, if it were not that our embryo must receive three distinct maturations to form the three distinct faculties of our soul, and beasts only two, to form their two powers? I know that the horse is only completed by ten, twelve or fourteen months in the belly of a mare; but since its constitution is so contrary to that which makes us men, since it is never born except in those months (notice!) which are entirely hostile to our birth, when we remain in the womb beyond the normal time, it is not surprising that Nature needs a longer time for the delivery of a mare than of a woman.[58]
"Yes, but, someone will say, the horse remains longer in its mother's belly than we do and consequently it receives either more perfect or more numerous maturations!
"I reply that it does not follow; for without relying on the observations on the energy of numbers made by so many learned men proving that, since all matter is in movement, certain beings are completed in a certain revolution of days and destroyed in another, and without strengthening myself with the proofs, whereby they deduce (after explaining the cause of all these movements) that the number nine is the most perfect; I shall content myself by replying that the germ of man is hotter and so the Sun fashions and completes more organs in him in nine months than it sketches out in a year in that of a colt. And it cannot be doubted that a horse is much colder than a man, since this animal only dies of a swollen spleen or other diseases which proceed from melancholy.
"Nevertheless, you will say, in our world we never see a man engendered from mud and produced in this fashion.
"I am sure that your world is now too heated; for as soon as the Sun attracts a germ from the Earth it does not meet that cold damp or, to put it better, that certain period of a completed movement which forces it to several maturations, and so it immediately forms a vegetable; or if two maturations take place, the second has no time to complete itself perfectly and so it only brings forth an insect: thus, I have noticed that the monkey, which like us carries its young nearly nine months, resembles us in so many ways that many naturalists do not distinguish the species from us; and the reason is that their seed is tempered much like ours and during this time has almost been able to complete the three digestions.
"You will undoubtedly ask me from whom I derive the story I have just told you: you will tell me that I cannot have learnt it from those who were not there. It is true that I was the only person there and, consequently, I cannot bear witness to it because it happened before I was born. That is true; but learn that, in a region so near the Sun as ours, souls are filled with fire and are clearer, more subtle and more penetrating than those of other animals in more distant spheres. Now, since even in your world there were prophets whose minds when heated by a vigorous enthusiasm presaged the future, it is not impossible that in this world, so much nearer the Sun and consequently so much more luminous than yours, some odour of the past should reach a powerful genius, that his mobile reason should move backwards as well as forwards and that it should be able to reach a cause by effects, seeing that it can reach effects by a cause."
In this way he finished what he was saying; but after a still more private conversation in which he revealed to me very hidden secrets (one part of which I shall keep silent, while the rest has escaped my memory) he told me that not three weeks before a lump of earth impregnated by the Sun had brought him forth.
"Look at that tumour."