As has been pointed out, we have as yet but scratched the outer surface in the fields of knowledge. What visions may not be opened to the eyes of men, as they go down deeper and deeper into the soil. Secrets will be exhumed undreamt of now, mysteries will be laid bare to the light of day, and perhaps the psychic riddle of life itself may be solved. Then indeed, Mars may come to be looked on as a next-door neighbor, with whose life and actions we are as well acquainted as with our own. The thirty-five million miles that separate him from us may be regarded as a mere step in space and the most distant planets of our system as but a little journey afield. Distant Uranus may be looked upon as no farther away than is, say, Australia from America at the present time. It is vain, however, to indulge in these premises. The veil of mystery still hangs between us and suns and stars and systems. One fact lies before us of which there is no uncertainty--_we die_ and pass away from our present state into some other. We are not annihilated into nothingness. Suns and worlds also die, after performing their allotted revolutions in the cycle of the universe. Suns glow for a time, and planets bear their fruitage of plants and animals and men, then turn for aeons into a dreary, icy listlessness and finally crumble to dust, their atoms joining other worlds in the indestructibility of matter. After all, there really is no death, simply change--change from one state to another. When we say we die, we simply mean that we change our state. There is a life beyond the grave. As Longfellow beautifully expresses it: "Life is real, life is earnest, And the grave is not its goal, Dust thou art, to dust returnest, Was not spoken of the soul." But whither do we go when we pass on? Where is the soul when it leaves the earthly tenement called the body? We, Christians, in the light of revelation and of faith, believe in a heaven for the good; but it is not a material place, only a state of being. Where and under what conditions is that state? This leads us to the consideration of another question which is engrossing the minds of many thinkers and reasoners of the present day. Can we communicate with the Spirit world? Despite the tenets and beliefs and experiences of learned and sincere investigators, we are constrained, thus far, to answer in the negative. Yet, though we cannot communicate with it, we know there is a spirit world; the inner consciousness of our being apprises us of that fact, we know our loved ones who have passed on are not dead but gone before, just a little space, and that soon we shall follow them into a higher existence. As Talmage said, the tombstone is not the terminus, but the starting post, the door to the higher life, the entrance to the state of endless labor, grand possibilities, and eternal progression. THE END End of Project Gutenberg's Marvels of Modern Science, by Paul Severing