Knowing all this, we can read with a new light the grand vistas of the skies, with their starry denizens, and claim them all as parts of our own family; and the mutual interchange of attractive energy and of light and heat will not fail between us until those inconceivable distances shall have been reached which human knowledge can never span and where speculation fails; and even there, from out those dark abysses,--dark to our human eyes,--the call will still faintly reach us, and our response will reach them also, though we shall never have tangible evidence that such mutual ties continue to exist. Industriously our planets gather their mighty energies from the surrounding springs of space, as one dips water from a crystal stream; we hand it over to our sun, and he, the royal high-priest, sprinkles it in glittering diamond-sprays over all those countless suns and their subject worlds, and they are baptized with an eternal baptism into our common brotherhood and we into theirs. Our familiar planets, Mars, Jupiter, Neptune, the earth, and even our little moon, seem to raise their voices and take actual part in the councils of almighty power, to move about as perpetual benefactors, gathering and spreading beneficence abroad, instead of cowering, a hapless few, like storm-stayed travellers, around the dying embers of our poor old sun, passive recipients of the light and heat and life which we have been taught to believe are slowly sinking into ashes and fading away in eternal darkness and death. One swift glance into these boundless truths is better for the human soul than the slow passage of whole hopeless centuries, which leave as their inevitable legacy on earth a vast and final catastrophe, in which everything that gave us light and heat and being must perish forever. Has it, indeed, come to this, that the last word which science has to offer is, "After us the deluge"? By no means. We have merely been endeavoring to measure the right hand of God by weighing and measuring a single isolated one of his countless multitude of suns.