We in our time as we gaze with unaided eye up at the mighty disk of the so called Milky Way, no longer regard the scintillating points glittering like diamonds in a jeweler's show-case, with feelings of awe, but the wonder is still upon us, wonder at the immensity of the works of Him who built the earth and sky, who, "throned in height sublime, sits amid the cherubim," King of the Universe, King of kings and Lord of lords. With a deep faith we look up and adore, then reverently exclaim,--"Lord, God! wonderful are the works of Thy Hands." CHAPTER XVI CAN WE COMMUNICATE WITH OTHER WORLDS? Vastness of Nature--Star Distances--Problem of Communicating with Mars--The Great Beyond. A story is told of a young lady who had just graduated from boarding school with high honors. Coming home in great glee, she cast her books aside as she announced to her friends;--"Thank goodness it is all over, I have nothing more to learn. I know Latin and Greek, French and German, Spanish and Italian; I have gone through Algebra, Geometry, Trigonometry, Conic Sections and the Calculus; I can interpret Beethoven and Wagner, and--but why enumerate?--in short, '_I know everything_.'" As she was thus proclaiming her knowledge her hoary-headed grandfather, a man whom the Universities of the world had honored by affixing a score of alphabetical letters to his name, was experimenting in his laboratory. The lines of long and deep study had corrugated his brow and furrowed his face. Wearily he bent over his retorts and test tubes. At length he turned away with a heavy sigh, threw up his hands and despairingly exclaimed,--"Alas, alas! after fifty years of study and investigation, I find _I know nothing_." There is a moral in this story that he who runs may read. Most of us are like the young lady,--in the pride of our ignorance, we fancy we know almost everything. We boast of the progress of our time, of what has been accomplished in our modern world, we proclaim our triumphs from the hilltops,--"Ha!" we shout, "we have annihilated time and distance; we have conquered the forces of nature and made them subservient to our will; we have chained the lightning and imprisoned the thunder; we have wandered through the fields of space and measured the dimensions and revolutions of stars and suns and planets and systems. We have opened the eternal gates of knowledge for all to enter and crowned man king of the universe."