by a certain analogy of conformation, which exists between animals of
different species, mules are easily produced; but these mules, unable to
co-order themselves with the beings that surround them, are not able to
reach perfection, consequently cannot propagate their species. Man can
live only in air, fish only in water: put the man into the water, the
fish into the air, not being able to co-order themselves with the fluids
which surround them, these animals will quickly be destroyed. Transport
by imagination, a man from our planet into SATURN, his lungs will
presently be rent by an atmosphere too rarified for his mode of being,
his members will be frozen with the intensity of the cold; he will
perish for want of finding elements analogous to his actual existence:
transport another into MERCURY, the excess of heat, beyond what his mode
of existence can bear, will quickly destroy him.

Thus, every thing seems to authorise the conjecture, that the human
species is a production peculiar to our sphere, in the position in which
it is found: that when this position may happen to change, the human
species will, of consequence, either be changed or will be obliged to
disappear; seeing that there would not then be that with which man could
co-order himself with the whole, or connect himself with that which can
enable him to subsist. It is this aptitude in man to co-order himself
with the whole, that not only furnishes him with the idea of order, but
also makes him exclaim "_whatever is, is right_;" whilst every thing is
only that which it can be, as long as the whole is necessarily what it
is; whilst it is positively neither good nor bad, as we understand those
terms: it is only requisite to displace a man, to make him accuse the
universe of confusion.

These reflections would appear to contradict the ideas of those, who are
willing to conjecture that the other planets, like our own, are