course, it is needless to say that all these fine ideal sentiments have gone utterly out of vogue, and, having left them behind us, we have only the Criminal Law on which to rely for the protection of life and property. It is needless to repeat that the delusive exhortations of some amiable but short-sighted philosophers of the last century to “labour for the good of Humanity in future generations” (a motive which they supposed would prove a substitute for the old Historic Religions) have been once and for all answered by the grand discovery of the Astronomers that our planet cannot long remain the habitation of man (even if it escape any sidereal explosion) since the Solar heat is undergoing such rapid exhaustion. When the day comes—as come it must—when the fruits of the earth perish one by one, when the dead and silent woods petrify, and all the races of animals become extinct—when the icy seas flow no longer, and the pallid Sun shines dimly over the frozen world, locked like the Moon in eternal frost and lifelessness—what, in that day predicted so surely by Science, will avail all the works, and hopes, and martyrdoms of man? All the stores of knowledge which we shall have accumulated will be for ever lost. Our discoveries, whereby we have become the lords of creation and wielded the great forces of Nature, will be useless and forgotten. The virtues which have been perfected, the genius which has glorified, the love which has blessed the human race, will all perish along with it. Our libraries of books, our galleries of pictures, our fleets, our railroads, our vast and busy cities, will be desolate and useless for evermore. No intelligent eye will ever behold them; and no mind in the universe will know or remember that there ever existed such a being as Man. _This_ is what SCIENCE teaches us unerringly to expect,—and in view of it, who shall talk to us of “labouring for the sake of Humanity”? The enthusiasm which could work disinterestedly for a Progress destined inevitably to end in an eternal Glacial Period must be recognised as a dream, wherein no man in a Scientific Age can long indulge.