BEUCHOT
October 4, 1829.

CONTENTS

I. [Voyage of an inhabitant of the Sirius star to the planet Saturn.]
II. [Conversation between the inhabitant of Sirius and that of Saturn.]
III. [Voyage of the two inhabitants of Sirius and Saturn.]
IV. [What happened on planet Earth.]
V. [Experiments and reasonings of the two voyagers.]
VI. [What happened to them among men.]
VII. [Conversation with the men.]

MICROMEGAS,
PHILOSOPHICAL HISTORY

CHAPTER I.

Voyage of an inhabitant of the Sirius star to the planet Saturn.

On one of the planets that orbits the star named Sirius there lived a spirited young man, who I had the honor of meeting on the last voyage he made to our little ant hill. He was called Micromegas[1], a fitting name for anyone so great. He was eight leagues tall, or 24,000 geometric paces of five feet each.

[1] From micros, small, and from megas, large. B.

Certain geometers[2], always of use to the public, will immediately take up their pens, and will find that since Mr. Micromegas, inhabitant of the country of Sirius, is 24,000 paces tall, which is equivalent to 120,000 feet, and since we citizens of the earth are hardly five feet tall, and our sphere 9,000 leagues around; they will find, I say, that it is absolutely necessary that the sphere that produced him was 21,600,000 times greater in circumference than our little Earth. Nothing in nature is simpler or more orderly. The sovereign states of Germany or Italy, which one can traverse in a half hour, compared to the empires of Turkey, Moscow, or China, are only feeble reflections of the prodigious differences that nature has placed in all beings.