interrupting you, but I am anxious to seize this opportunity to question you on a particular point respecting the Dictator. Since you have seen Julius Cæsar, tell me, I pray you, if his face resembles that given by the Emperor Napoleon III. in his great work on the life of that famous captain?LUMEN. I should be delighted, my old friend, to enlighten you on this point if it were possible for me to do so. But reflect for a moment, and you will see that the laws of perspective forbid me.QUÆRENS. Of perspective? You mean to say of politics.LUMEN. No, of perspective (although these two things strongly resemble one another); for in seeing great men from the height of heaven, I do not see them as they appear to the vulgar. From the heavens we see men geometrically from above, not face to face; that is to say, when they are standing we have only a horizontal projection of them. You may remember that once in a balloon, as we passed over the Vendôme Column at Paris, you remarked to me that Napoleon seen from that height was not above the level of other men. It was just the same with Cæsar. In the other world material measures disappear, only intellectual measures exist.To continue, however, I retraced history, from Julius Cæsar to the Consuls, and then to the kings of Latium, in order to witness the rape of the Sabines, which I was pleased to observe actually, as a type of ancient manners. History has embellished many things, and I discovered that most events as represented to us are totally different from the actual facts. Then I saw King Candaules in Lydia, in the scene in the bath that you remember, then the invasion of Egypt by the Ethiopians, the oligarchical republic of Corinth, the eighth Olympiad in Greece, and Isaiah the prophet in Judea. I saw the building of the Pyramids by troops of obedient slaves under chiefs mounted on dromedaries. The great dynasties of Bactria and of India appeared before me, and China showed the marvellous skill in the arts that she possessed even before the birth of the western world. I had an opportunity to search for the Atlantis of Plato, and I saw that the opinions of Bailly on that continent, now submerged, are not devoid of foundation. In Gaul I could distinguish nothing but vast forests and swamps; even the Druids had disappeared, and the savage inhabitants strongly resembled those that we find now in Oceania. It was truly the stone age as it is unearthed for us by modern archaeologists. Further back still, I saw that the number of men diminished by degrees, and the domination of nature seemed to belong to a race of the great apes, to the cave bears, to lions, hyenas, and the rhinoceros. A moment arrived when it was not only impossible to distinguish a single man on the surface of the earth, but when not the 

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