Their beauty, delicacy, and brightness reminded me by contrast of the conditions imposed by terrestrial life. I remembered that brute force reigns supreme here, that millions of beings are killed every day to assure the existence of the rest, that war is a natural law amongst animals, and that humanity is so little freed from animal barbarism that nearly all people continue to accept, as in primitive times, slavery and servitude. Being so far from the Earth, I judged of the colossal stupidity of the inhabitants of our planet. But if, down to our own times, the nations have made their greatest glory consist of international butcheries, that state is transitory. Every tree bears fruit after its kind. Tortoises and bears cannot aspire to the wings of the swallow or the song of the thrush. The military glories of Alexander, Cæsar, Charlemagne, Napoleon, or Bismarck, being of the order of carnivorous animal instincts, last no longer than the brutal repast itself, and a few centuries suffice to efface them from the history of the planet. Endeavouring to estimate the real importance of this history and of our planet itself, I searched space, not only for the Earth which had become invisible long ago, but even the Sun; but I could neither find the Sun nor any of its brightest neighbours such as Alpha Centauri or Sirius, nor any of the stars which one sees from the Earth. The whole region of space where our floating island gravitates had disappeared long ago as an insignificant point in the depths of space. Austerlitz, Waterloo, Sevastopol, Magenta, Sadowa, Keichshofen, Sedan, were but microscopic agitations in a Lilliputian ant-heap, amusement of infants delighting in muscular exercises involving blood and smoke. Why blame them? Why pity them? They do what pleases them and nobody forces them to do it. Why should astronomy use a magnifying-glass to study the microbes on a planet T The system of many-coloured suns, the blinding organic wealth of which had inspired me to return to the earthly twilight, revolves at a distance of 60,000 billion miles. Light takes more than ten years to traverse this distance. Yet this is nothing extraordinary in the way of astronomical distance. Sirius, the most brilliant star of our sky, transported to that distance, would be 3,500 times farther away than it is in reality, and it would send us 12 million times less light. It would be a small point, still within the range of the new photographic processes. It would be a telescopic star of the 18th magnitude.