“The Dust Fay approached a basin as large as a sea and, plunging her arm into it, she first pulled out strange plants; then animals even stranger, which were still half-plant; then free individuals, separate from one another, living mollusks, and eventually fish, which she made to jump, saying: 'That’s what Dame Dust can produce when she deposits herself on the bed of the waters. But there’s better—turn around and look at the shore.'

“In fact, I saw an arborescent vegetation rise up rapidly and become populated by reptiles and insects, while unknown beings agitated on the shore that caused me a veritable terror. 

“'Those animals won’t terrify you in the earth of the future,' said the fay. 'They’re destined to fertilize it with their remains; there aren’t any humans here yet to fear them.'

“'Wait!' I cried. 'Did you need all these massacres and all these stupidities to make us a compost heap?'

“'The great fay Nature has higher aims,' replied Dame Dust. 'She doesn’t intend to stop at the things you know. She works and invents perpetually. For her, who knows no suspension of life, repose would be death. 

“'The future will make of all of you, feeble human creatures, into fays and genii who possess science, reason and goodness. See what I am enabling you to see, and know that these first sketches of life, summarized in instinct, are closer to you than you are to what will one day be: the reign of the spirit over the earth that you inhabit. The occupants of that future world will then have the right to be as profoundly scornful of you as you are scornful today of the world of the great saurians.'”

Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Francueil, 1875