luminous with all the varied hues of a million rainbows, with mighty arches of flaming light, and sapphire domes, and streaming banners of varying colors of orange and gold and purple, waving and flaring out into space thousands and millions of miles, as the electric currents speed on their lifegiving mission to the earth and the planets.

Those far-flaming and ever-changing protuberances that the astronomers marvel at are the swift departing rays of sunlight embracing each other and travelling thousands of miles together as they go on their swift journey of mercy to man and all living things in the solar worlds. They are the emanations of life from the Father of life and spirits. They are the floods of electric atomic energy, that mould our bodies, and build up and preserve all organic forms of life. They come from the great electro-magnetic sea of invisible ether that fills all space, and permeates all suns and worlds and all created things. And they are the electric clothing of life, and light, and warmth to the physical world.

CHAPTER VII

THE PLANETS ARE THE HATCHERIES OF HUMAN SOULS, THE SUNS THEIR PLACE OF

MATURITY AND PERFECTION.

If we could tell the story of a flower or a blade of grass we could understand the mystery of atoms of electricity, of life, and follow the existence and movements of that mysterious power which we can neither see, nor touch, nor define, nor measure, nor understand; which lives speechless, noiseless, unseen, yet energetic in every green leaf of opening spring; in every floating cloud in the blue dome, in every throb of life in our sensate souls. There is unity in all nature, and all things come from the same invisible source, the same invisible law, invisible force, and invisible atom. All are alike in nature, similar in form, but various in their offices and activities.

Through the eye of science the shadows that surround the earth fade into the luminous beauties of countless spheres, and we contemplate the wonderful works of the Creator in the serene immensity of a boundless sky. Millions of suns and worlds pass in panoramic review, and creation is ablaze with countless constellations. The poetic sweep of fancy is then surpassed by the magnificence of the reality, whose resplendent beauty hushes our souls to reverent silence. Then we realize that truth and reality are more inspiring and magnificent than all the rainbow sweeps of fancy or the gorgeous flights

of imagination. Truth is superior to fiction; and fancy and imagination, which with reason are the highest gifts of Deity, were meant to lift us up to the altitude of gods and enable us to comprehend the wonders and immensity of the universe.

The heavens and the earth are not two separate creations. The earth is in the heavens, as Flammarion states it. The heavens are infinite space, indefinite expanse, a void without limit. No frontier circumscribes them; they have neither beginning nor end, neither top nor bottom, right nor left. There is an infinity of spaces which succeed each other in every direction. Our earth is a little globe shot like a swift bullet through space, without any support to sustain it in its aerial flight or to guide its destiny, but the invisible power of Deity and His right hand of power, electricity. And its flight is fifty times faster than a leaden ball from a rifle, and seventyfive times faster than a cannon ball. The earth moves forward at every swing of the pendulum 18.91 miles, while a cannon ball moves only two thousand feet in the same time, and the swiftest bullet less than half a mile. And while the earth shoots through space like a swift bullet, the sun shoots through space like a vast cannon ball drawing the earth and planets after it.

The infinite everywhere surrounds us, and we might float for eternity amid countless worlds and glittering suns and constellations without finding a boundary or a limit to creation. This universe with its eighteen millions of suns and over thirty millions of planets, may be but one of millions of universes with millions of suns and planets. All our ideas of space are purely relative. We are situated in the bosom of the infinite. We can neither ascend nor

descend, there is no above and below. Creation is an expanse without limit, shoreless and boundless, in the bosom of which float suns like that which illumines our path, and planets like that which revolves beneath our feet. We are awed, fascinated, exalted, and at last bow in wonder before the eternal immensity and the measureless eternity, forever growing, expanding, and eternally renewed. We and our earth are a part of this vast and measureless universe, every atom of which is like every other atom, and every sun and world similar in form and substance.

Sir Robert Ball says it is impossible to conceive of any organized being that could live in the intense heat of the sun. Therefore, he says, the sun is uninhabited. Then he says the moon, the next celestial world in importance to the sun, lacking atmosphere and moisture, is surely uninhabited. He says the days and nights there would last for a fortnight, and during the two weeks of day we would be terribly scorched, and during the two weeks of night we would be frozen to death. Then the absence of air and water would prevent respiration, and even if we could bring a supply of oxygen to avoid suffocation, we could hear nothing, for sounds exist not except in air. We could light no fire, feel no wind, and see no clouds. The extraordinary lightness of everything would surprise us. Every object would be reduced in weight to one-sixth. Our bodies would partake of the general buoyancy. Walking and running would be easy, and we could jump a wall of eighteen feet high as easy as one three feet high here. Even taking a header over the bicycle handles would lose its terrors, for the lunar bicyclist would fall gently and softly to his mother

earth. Therefore, he concludes, there can be no life on the moon. This may be true unless the moon is in her glacial period with an imperceptible atmosphere and a low order of human beings, and this is not an unreasonable hypothesis. Its seeming volcanoes may be ice mountains, and its deep gorges sunken valleys, and its sunken surface a mass of snow and ice. Volcanic action requires water.

Could we live on Neptune, which is thirty times farther from the sun than our earth? He concludes not, as it takes one hundred and sixty-five years to complete its orbit, and a man born in midwinter in Neptune would have reached extreme old age if he survived until the next ensuing mid

summer.

He says there is one body, Mars, which has size, times, and seasons most closely in accord with our earth, and that life of some kind may be found there. The temperature may be endurable, and water appears to be not wanting, but thinks the atmosphere would not suit human beings. Then as to comets, he says they traverse regions where the cold would be absolutely incompatible with human life, and they are not inhabitable.

He says the first qualification for a globe as a possible abode for organic life is the presence of an atmosphere. The atmosphere is of such fundamental importance that it is difficult to imagine what types of life could exist on an airless globe, as the atmosphere mitigates the fierceness of heat during the day and screens from cold and restricts radiation into space at night.

Ball says: "It is well known that the sun is envel oped by an atmosphere remarkable for the prodigious extent that it occupies; while the moon has