No, this dream was no dream. For to the human race which lived on the different worlds of space during the ages preceding the formation of our solar system, the Earth with all its history was only a possibility of what the future might bring forth. It might never have existed at all. The writers of history of terrestrial peoples, Moses, Herodotus, Manetho, Ma-Tuan-Lin, Titus Livius, Tacitus, Gregory of Tours, Bossuet, all those who have attempted to write universal histories, the great Leibnitz himself, who placed the commencement of the history of a small German duchy at the time of creation of the world, and even the delightful author of the Metamorphoses, who tells of the history of the birth of the Earth and Heaven--the astronomer smiles at their annals, as he has smiled at the genealogies of the kings and the conquests of the Cæsars-- “Battles of ants in microscopic space.” Simple illusions of infants who fondle their dolls! Let them invent new microscopes for distinguishing Charlemagne and Napoleon in the ant-heap of Lilliput; we cannot find them! And the whole Earth, where is it? By an abstraction of thought, we manage to live before it and after it; its whole history has disappeared like a lightning flash which passes in the calm of a long summer day. * * * * * As I contemplated those panoramas of time and space, as the bygone ages passed slowly across my view, with their long trails of past glories, and as the races which peopled the worlds arose from the depths of space, shedding their winding-sheets and walking again in the flowery paths of life, all this prodigious secular past became present, and the millions of suns extinguished through the ages lighted up and shone again. The sky was bright with innumerable stars which our eyes had never seen, and the light of life shed its rays on celestial shores stretching away to infinity! Suddenly, an immense black veil fell from the skies and hid the view, and I saw no more. In front of this veil, our planet flew along with its speed of 62 thousand miles an hour. I found myself again in the ordinary condition of an Earth-dweller, who sees nothing beyond the horizon, and who imagines that, in time as in space, our mediocre humanity exists alone on the world. III. THE WORLD TO COME CHAPTER III THE WORLD TO COME The future is as real as the past. The world to come is in the mind’s eye as substantial as the world of long ago.