felicity is only to be hoped for in another sphere."

"What a curious series of transformations! First an aquatic insect,
next amphibious, then throwing away the organs for which it has no
further use, and becoming provided with those suited to its new
state!"

"Yes, my dear Fritz; and yet those complicated and beautiful
operations of Nature have not prevented philosophers from asserting
that the world resulted from _floating atoms_, which, by force of
combination, and after an infinity of blind movements, conglomerate
into plants, animals, men, heaven, and earth."

"I am only a plain sailor," said Willis "yet the eye of a worm teaches
me more than these philosophers seem to have imagined in their
philosophy."

"Such a system could only have originated in Bedlam or Charenton."

"No, Ernest, it is the system of Epicurus and Lucretius. Without going
so far back, there are a thousand others quite as ridiculous, with
which it is unnecessary to charge your young heads."

"All madmen are not in confinement, and it may be that Epicurus and
Lucretius had arrived at those limits of human reason, where genius
begins in some and folly in others."

"It is not that, Fritz; but if men, says Malebranche somewhere,[A] are
interested in having the sides of an equilateral triangle unequal, and
that false geometry was as agreeable to them as false philosophy, they