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Updated: May 29, 2025
"Not so very much to see after all. Little streaks and shreds of pink. And yet those little particles, those mere atomies, might multiply and devastate a city! Wonderful!" He stood up, and releasing the glass slip from the microscope, held it in his hand towards the window. "Scarcely visible," he said, scrutinising the preparation. He hesitated. "Are these alive? Are they dangerous now?"
With scarcely a week’s existence to boast of, he had been swaddled up in strange clothes; intrusted to strange hands; and hurried away some hundred leagues from the capital, to scramble about the clay floor of an unwholesome cottage, in company perhaps with some half-dozen atomies like himself, as strange to each other as they were to their own parents, to pass those famous mois de nourrice which form so important and momentous a period in the lives of most French people.
The soldiery soon feel where their home is, and feel the pride of atomies in unitive power, when they are sneered at, hooted, pelted, stabbed upon a gross misinterpretation of the slightest of moral offences, shamefully abused for doing their duty with a considerate sense of it, and too accurately divided from the inhabitants of the land they hold.
Part of the building stone of the Great Pyramid in Egypt is composed, I am told, entirely of them. And how did they get into the chalk? Ah! How indeed? Let us think. The chalk must have been laid down at the bottom of a sea, because there are sea-shells in it. Besides, we find little atomies exactly like these alive now in many seas; and therefore it is fair to suppose these lived in the sea also.
And then at last that little black rounded pebble, from the street outside, may, and will surely, if I be patient and honest enough, tell me a tale wilder and grander than any which I could have dreamed for myself; will shame the meanness of my imagination, by the awful magnificence of God's facts, and say to me: "Ages and AEons since, thousands on thousands of years before there was a man to till the ground, I the little pebble was a living sponge, in the milky depths of the great chalk ocean; and hundreds of living atomies, each more fantastic than a ghost-painter's dreams, swam round me, and grew on me, and multiplied, till I became a tiny hive of wonders, each one of which would take you a life to understand.
Look here! here they are, the wonder-working atomies! Eat no food this day, except one of these every three hours, and come to me to-night at the house of your porter, Eudaimon, bringing with you the black agate; and then why then, what you have the heart to see, you shall see! Hypatia took the wafers, hesitating 'But what are they? 'And you profess to explain Homer?
And more: they found out, to their surprise, that the oozy mud of the Atlantic floor was made up almost entirely of just the same atomies as make up our chalk, especially globigerinas; that, in fact, a vast bed of chalk was now forming at the bottom of the Atlantic, with living shells and sea-animals of the most brilliant colours crawling about on it in black darkness, and beds of sponges growing out of it, just as the sponges grew at the bottom of the old chalk ocean, and were all, generation after generation, turned into flints.
And yet it is so cursed a piece of land that the son is ashamed to be his father's heir in it. It is an infected pest-house all the year long; the plague-sores of the law are the diseases here hotly reigning. The surgeons are atomies and pettifoggers, who kill more than they cure. Lord have mercy upon us, may well stand over these doors, for debt is a most dangerous and catching city pestilence.
Two or three of these atomies would hardly have made a square meal for a ladybird, and I should think that a starling after swallowing a thousand would fed very hungry. And on many days this scanty, watery food had to be searched for in very painful conditions, as it rained heavily on most days and often all day long.
If you put together a great many similar consonants in one sentence, they will attract special attention to the words in which they occur, and the significance of those words, whatever it may be, is thereby intensified; but whether the words are 'a team of little atomies' or 'a triumphant terrible Titan, it is not the sound of the consonants that makes the significance.
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