5
Consider the earth in its origin: at first, a shapeless nebula, becoming gradually more and more condensed; next, a globe of fire, of rocks in fusion, whirling for millions of years through space, with no other object than that of forming into a mass and cooling: an inconceivable incandescence, which none of our sources of heat can enable us to picture; an essential, scientific, absolute barrenness which may well have proclaimed itself irremediable and everlasting. Who would have thought that from these torrents of matter in eruption, which seemed to have destroyed for ever all life or the least germ of life, there would emerge each and every form of life itself, from the most enormous, the strongest, the most enduring, the most impetuous, the most abundant, down to the slightest, the least visible, the most precarious, the most ephemeral, the most exiguous? Who above all could have dared foresee that they would give birth to what seems so utterly alien to the liquefied or pasty rocks and metals that alone formed the surface, the nucleus and the very entity of our globe, I mean our human intelligence and consciousness?