But in telling of my Venetian dream I did not want to indulge in irritating polemics, and my only object was to show to some open eyes the horizons of astronomical philosophy, and I hasten to return to my sidereal voyage and to describe its last phase. I shall, however, add another word concerning our tiny planet, remarking that its inhabitants are as a rule so unintelligent and so incapable of judgment that they imagine that all have an equal intellectual and moral value and that in the most civilised country of this globe the vote of an imbecile or a drunkard has the same weight as that of an educated thinker, so that the legislative chamber entrusted with the fate of the country is an incoherent mass of persons incompetent to deal with any of the questions likely to arise. Half of them are ignorant and are preoccupied with their private concerns. In this system of pretended equality, Judas is the same as Jesus, Philip II equals Marcus Aurelius. Torquemada is the same as St. Vincent de Paul, Fouquier-Tinville the same as Mirabeau, and the wine-merchant at the corner is the equal of Archimedes and Pythagoras. There is no reasoning. Our little planet is as insignificant morally as it is physically. Among terrestrial humanity only one man in a hundred is intelligent. Humanity is practically no older than four or five years as regards intelligence compared with what it ought to be normally. I had traversed several universes analogous to our galactic system, universes separated from each other by abysses of nothingness, and what had struck me most in this general survey was meeting a number of humanities foreign to our own living in various regions of space, living their own lives and carried along to their destiny in the whirlpool of their personal affairs. While the inhabitants of the Earth reduce creation to their own size, thousands, millions, billions, of other humanities live in every degree of intellectual advancement on solar systems which to them are the very centre of observation and from which our terrestrial home appears lost in the infinite distance. I also saw dead worlds. It is a fact worthy of attention that all existence tends towards death. Beings only come into existence to die. The worlds only attain periods of vitality to descend again into decadence and the tomb. Suns only burn to be extinguished. Death would therefore be the supreme law, the final result. The mathematician can now calculate with great accuracy the date when our Sun will become extinct aid when the Earth will roll on through the eternal night like an icy cemetery. The entire history of terrestrial humanity will have arrived at an absolute zero. The time will come when even the ruins will be destroyed. On account of the tendency of energy to establish itself in a state of stable equilibrium in the universe, life will have an end on our planet as well as the other worlds.