On a planet revolving around the
star Sirius there lived a young man of great intelligence, whose acquaintance I
had the honor of making during his recent visit to our little anthill. He was
called Micromegas, an appropriate name for great people. He had a stature of
eight leagues, or 24,000 geometrical paces of five feet each, or 120,000
statute feet.
We earthmen have an average
stature hardly more than five feet--one pace--so Mr. Micromegas' world must in
turn have a circumference 24,000 times greater than our little Earth. Nothing
in nature is simpler, more a matter of course. The dominions of certain
potentates in Germany or Italy, around which you can walk in half an hour,
compared with the empires of Turkey, Russia, or China can give but a faint idea
of the vast disparity Nature has set between different orders of being
throughout the universe.
Given his Excellency's height,
any sculptor or painter would agree his waist should, proportionally, be about
50,000 feet around. His nose being one third the length of his handsome face,
and his handsome face being one-seventh the height of his handsome body, it
follows that the Sirian's nose is some 5,714 statute feet long.
His mind rivals the most
cultivated among us; he knows many things, some of which are his own
inventions. He had not yet reached his 250th year, and was studying, as was
customary at his age, at the most famous school on the planet, when he solved
50 propositions of Euclid--18 more than Blaise Pascal, who, after having,
according to his sister's account, solved 32 for his own amusement, became a
pretty fair geometer, and a very poor metaphysician.
When Micromegas was about 450
years old, and already passing out of childhood, he dissected, with the aid of
powerful microscopes, many little insects less than 100 feet in diameter; he
wrote an interesting book about them, which got him into trouble.
