Does this all seem but the idlest fancy? That something like it will come to pass sooner or later, is a most certain fact--as certain as any process of Nature--if we do not find a new source of power; for of the coal which has supplied us, after a certain time we can get no more. Future ages may see the seat of empire transferred to regions of the earth now barren and desolated under intense solar heat,--countries which, for that very cause, will not improbably become the seat of mechanical and thence of political power. Whoever finds the way to make industrially useful the vast sun-power now wasted on the deserts of North Africa or the shores of the Red Sea, will effect a greater change in men’s affairs than any conqueror in history has done; for he will once more people those waste places with the life that swarmed there in the best days of Carthage and of old Egypt, but under another civilization, where man no longer shall worship the sun as a god, but shall have learned to make it his servant. V. THE PLANETS AND THE MOON. When we look up at the heavens, we see, if we watch through the night, the host of stars rising in the east and passing above us to sink in the west, always at the same distance and in unchanging order, each seeming a point of light as feeble as the glow-worm’s shine in the meadow over which they are rising, each flickering as though the evening wind would blow it out. The infant stretches out its hand to grasp the Pleiades; but when the child has become an old man the “seven stars” are still there unchanged, dim only in his aged sight, and proving themselves the enduring substance, while it is his own life which has gone, as the shine of the glow-worm in the night. They were there just the same a hundred generations ago, before the Pyramids were built; and they will tremble there still, when the Pyramids have been worn down to dust with the blowing of the desert sand against their granite sides. They watched the earth grow fit for man long before man came, and they will doubtless be shining on when our poor human race itself has disappeared from the surface of this planet. Probably there is no one of us who has not felt this solemn sense of their almost infinite duration as compared with his own little portion of time, and it would be a worthy subject for our thought if we could study them in the light that the New Astronomy sheds for us on their nature. But I must here confine myself to the description of but a few of their number, and speak, not of the infinite multitude and variety of stars, each a self-shining sun, but only of those which move close at hand; for it is not true of quite all that they keep at the same distance and order.