“Now the embrace of peace.”

“Ah, madam,” said Jack, “you must excuse that ceremony, their friendship is too new for such intimacy, and Knips don’t much like being bitten.”

“Need we other proofs,” remarked Becker, when the scene between the monkeys was concluded, “that everything has been premeditated, weighed, and calculated?  It was necessary for that most arid country, Arabia, that we should have a sober animal, susceptible of existing a long time without water, and capable of treading the hot sands of the desert.  God has accordingly given us the camel.”

“And the dromedary,” remarked Ernest.

“So everywhere,” continued Becker; “and add to these evidences of Divine wisdom the brilliant colors, the silken furs, the golden plumage, and the ever-varying forms, yet, in all this diversity, there is unison—­a harmony.  Like the various objects which a clever artist introduces into his sketch, they are placed without uniformity, but still with reference to their effect upon each other, and so to the unity of the general design.”

“Therefore,” remarked Ernest, “we have an animal whose skin is of stone, which it throws off annually to assume a new one—­whose flesh is its tail and in its feet—­whose hair is found inside in its breast—­whose stomach is in its head, which, like the skin, is renewed every year, the first function of the new being to digest the old one.”

Here the Pilot manifested some symptoms of incredulity.

“That is not all, Willis,” continued Ernest, “the animal of which I speak carries its eggs in the interior of its body till they are hatched, and then transfers them to its tail.  It has pebbles in its stomach, can throw off its limbs when they incommode it, and replace them with others more to its fancy.  To finish the portrait, its eyes are placed at the tip of long flexible horns.”

“Do you really mean me to believe that yarn?” inquired Willis.

“Yes, Willis, unless you intend to deny the existence of lobsters.”

“Lobsters!  Ah! you are talking of them, are you!”

“Have not,” continued Ernest, “six thousand three hundred and sixty-two eyes been counted in one beetle? sixteen thousand in a fly? and as many as thirty-four thousand six hundred in a butterfly?  Of course, facets understood.”

“Supposing these facets myope or presbyte,” observed Jack, “that gives seventeen thousand three hundred and twenty-five pairs of spectacles on one nose!”

“How wonderfully varied are the forms of Nature.  If, from the mastodon and the fossil mammoth, to which Buffon attributes five or six times the bulk and size of the elephant, we descend to those animalculae, of which Leuwenhoek estimates that a thousand millions of them would not occupy the place of an ordinary grain of sand.”

Here Willis lost all patience and left the gallery, whistling as usual, under such circumstances, the “Mariner’s March.”