most delicate things he knows. Let a mite be given him, with its minute body
and parts incomparably more minute, limbs with their joints, veins in the
limbs, blood in the veins, humours in the blood, drops in the humours,
vapours in the drops. Dividing these last things again, let him exhaust his
powers of conception, and let the last object at which he can arrive be now
that of our discourse. Perhaps he will think that here is the smallest point
in nature. I will let him see therein a new abyss. I will paint for him not
only the visible universe, but all that he can conceive of nature's
immensity in the womb of this abridged atom. Let him see therein an infinity
of universes, each of which has its firmament, its planets, its earth, in
the same proportion as in the visible world; in each earth animals, and in
the last mites, in which he will find again all that the first had, finding
still in these others the same thing without end and without cessation. Let
him lose himself in wonders as amazing in their littleness as the others in