On [:] Fossil | Honoré de Balzac, 1831

William Smith, Historical plate showing fossils, 1817

“Have you ever plunged into the immensity of space and time by reading the geological treatises of Cuvier? Borne away on the wings of his genius, have you hovered over the illimitable abyss of the past as if a magician’s hand were holding you aloft? As one penetrates from seam to seam, from stratum to stratum and discovers, under the quarries of Montmartre or in the schists of the Urals, those animals whose fossilized remains belong to antediluvian civilizations, the mind is startled to catch a vista of the milliards of years and the millions of peoples which the feeble memory of man and an indestructible divine tradition have forgotten and whose ashes heaped on the surface of our globe, form the two feet of earth which furnish us with bread and flowers.”

Honoré de Balzac, The Wild Ass’s Skin, 1831

Also:
Book//mark – A Woman of Thirty | Honoré de Balzac, 1842
Thoughts on { Treatise on Elegant Living | Honore de Balzac, 1830