absorption bands, and finally to the whole solar mass, expanding its volume in proportion to the heat absorbed. Hence we should see precisely the phenomena that we do see in flaming stars or so-called new stars. We find such compensations all through nature, and it is simply in accordance with her universal laws that they occur. It is a singular circumstance that the catastrophe which is foretold in the biblical record as the termination of all human life on earth, for the present cycle, at least, should be almost literally in accordance with the phenomena characteristic of such an increase of solar energy, and one produced in some such manner. If the temperature of the solar atmosphere were rapidly raised by increased planetary action to a point which would reverse the lines of hydrogen from dark to bright, say to a brightness eight hundred times that of the normal, as in the case of the temporary star cited, though the heat would not, of course, be increased in any such proportion, yet the heavens would be indeed rolled up as a scroll, and all life would be extinguished in a very brief period. But the planets would continue to roll along their orbits, the integrity of the earth's mass would still be intact, and after a few days or weeks the sun would begin to decline in brightness, the volatilized vapors would slowly recede within the solar atmosphere, and the temperature would gradually fall again to its normal, leaving, however, a lifeless world to roll on its way henceforth, but as bright and cheerful in all its possibilities, when the former conditions had gradually become restored, as before. Perhaps some distant astronomer in the neighborhood of Sirius--if we shall have travelled so far away by that time--might send a note to the morning papers to announce that the temporary star near Alpha Centauri had again receded to the tenth magnitude. In due time--perhaps a thousand years--all would be ready for a new development of life, and the cycle would continue as before. Perchance, too, in some deep abyss, or buried far beneath the surface, some germs of life might still continue to exist; and from these, like the seeds resurrected from buried mummies, a new life might again begin, guided along once more through vast ages in a progressive ascent from development to development until, in some new and strange forms, the higher types of life might again appear. To these there would indeed be revealed a new heaven and a new earth. Who knows how many such cycles of life may have come and gone on earth, in which, like the dwellers of Jerusalem, new peoples have built new cities, one above another, upon the unknown graves of the past? In the words of Tennyson,--