It is impossible for us to conceive anything more terrible than these closing days, for no menace of catastrophe which we can picture could bear within it such a certainty of fulfilment. It appears, therefore, useless to speculate on the probable actions of men in their now terrestrial prison. Hope, which so far had buoyed them up in the direst calamities, would here have no place. Humanity, in the fulness of its strength, would await a wholesale execution from which there could be no chance at all of a reprieve. Observations of the approaching body would have enabled astronomers to calculate its path with great exactness, and to predict the instant and character of the impact. Eight minutes after the moment allotted for the collision the resulting tide of flame would surge across the earth's orbit, and our globe would quickly pass away in vapour. And what then? A nebula, no doubt; and after untold ages the formation possibly from it of a new system, rising phoenix-like from the vast crematorium and filling the place of the old one. A new central sun, perhaps, with its attendant retinue of planets and satellites. And teeming life, perchance, appearing once more in the fulness of time, when temperature in one or other of these bodies had fallen within certain limits, and other predisposing conditions had supervened. "The world's great age begins anew, The golden years return, The earth doth like a snake renew Her winter weeds outworn: Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam Like wrecks of a dissolving dream. A brighter Hellas rears its mountains From waves serener far; A new Peneus rolls his fountains Against the morning star; Where fairer Tempes bloom, there sleep Young Cyclads on a sunnier deep. A loftier Argo cleaves the main, Fraught with a later prize; Another Orpheus sings again, And loves, and weeps, and dies; A new Ulysses leaves once more Calypso for his native shore. * * * * * Oh cease! must hate and death return? Cease! must men kill and die? Cease! drain not to its dregs the urn Of bitter prophecy! The world is weary of the past,-- Oh might it die or rest at last!" [39] See his work, _La Fin du Monde_, wherein the various ways by which our world may come to an end are dealt with at length, and in a profoundly interesting manner. INDEX Achromatic telescope, 115, 116 Adams, 24, 236, 243 Aerial telescopes, 110, 111 Agathocles, Eclipse of, 85 Agrippa, Camillus, 44 Ahaz, dial of, 85 Air, 166 Airy, Sir G.B., 92 Al gûl, 307 Al Sufi, 284, 290, 296, 315 Alcor, 294 Alcyone, 284 Aldebaran, 103, 288, 290, 297 Algol, 307, 309-310, 312, 323, 347 Alpha, Centauri, 52-53, 280, 298-299, 304, 320 Alpha Crucis, 298 Alps, Lunar, 200 Altair, 295 Altitude of objects in sky, 196 Aluminium, 145 Amos viii. 9, 85 Anderson, T.D., 311-312