With the munificent contributions to a general fund, amounting to two million dollars, by the English, American and French Governments, the greatest telescope which the world has ever known was constructed in Paris. Its lenses measured more than two meters in diameter which, combined with a mammoth revolving camera obscura, brought the moon and some of the planets within the range of visual observation, revealing on Venus and Mars the existence of vegetation and moving objects. 1939 The Earth An Electric Motor Emil Flammarion, the worthy grandson of the eminent French astronomer, demonstrated by an extremely clever mechanical contrivance in Vacuo, that the Earth was merely an electric Motor in space! 1940 The Trend of Religious Thought Religious thought or spiritual belief is not an invention of mortals. It is an inborn attribute of the human mind. While man was in his savage or semi-barbarous stage, the ethical and spiritual conceptions were correspondingly crude and religious warfare predominated. With the advance of civilization its development kept pace with it until at the dawn of the twentieth century it had undergone, by natural evolution, a marked metamorphosis. It gradually divested itself of its legendary mysticism, fantastic dogmas and spectacular schisms, and all intelligent thinkers promulgated a propaganda, not of external forms of worship, but those uncontrovertible basic truths, which always will hold. It is true that in an era of commercial materialism great masses of people embraced agnosticism and ethical culture, rejecting that supernatural conception of a first cause of which they claimed their limited intellect had a vague idea and was deeper than the hazy human comprehension, yet, the shallow Ingersolian philosophy of attacking a force--which filled millions with hope and goaded them to self-sacrifice, mercy and charity--without substituting something better, was repudiated by the intelligent, and appealed only to the abnormal and the foolish. This tendency of materialism in religion continued unabated, until the startling announcement of a German scientist--who claimed it was within human power to rend the world in twain--also the marvelous revelation through the mammoth telescope--by which was discovered moving objects and vegetation in other planets--brought on an acute crisis. A tremendous religious revival swept all over the world. It expanded the mental horizon of human conceptions. The existence of living organism in other spheres came within rational deductions. The possible existence of beings far superior in intellect to ourselves, came within the limit of legitimate theorizations, and the more men began to grasp with the co-operation of science, the infinite vastness of the universe, with its numberless millions of habitable worlds, the probability of an intelligent force of vast creative power came within the scope of human understanding.