“On this subject, illustrious Amilec, I will tell you that they take the idea of the plurality of worlds to extremes. They know that Mercury, Venus, all the other planets and their satellites are inhabited, like the Earth, or habitable. They also know that every fixed Star is a Sun that illuminates its Earths, as ours illuminates its own. 

“In addition to that, however, they claim that every drop of water, having, as everyone knows, a swirling movement, must be a little world, in the center of which there is a tiny sun, which illuminates even tinier worlds placed at its circumference—with the result that when a Lunar Philosopher drinks a glass of water he regards himself as a monstrous animal swallowing a prodigious multitude of Suns, Earths, Moons and Worlds. 

“Furthermore, they say that, what a drop of water—which is an aqueous world—is to ours, ours may be to a third. It might be that our Sun, our fixed Stars and our Vortices is, as a whole, nothing but a drop of liquid, which some enormous animal, an inhabitant of a Planette much more immense than we can imagine, might one day drink.”

Charles-François Tiphaigne de La Roche, 1754