Then he proceeds to tell the kind of dullness and stagnation that existed. He says almost every scientific discovery had been made thousands of years before, and all inventions had been perfected, and everything went on as by machinery. The peace of the world was settled and the time when men fought and killed each other in war lay far back in the mists of antiquity, and the newspapers chronicled little but births, marriages, deaths and the weather reports. "Only one language was spoken the world over, and all gentlemen dined in blue coats with gilt buttons and wore white neckties with red borders." Now I cannot accept this as a true picture of our earth at any time in its future, or the hypothesis of human stagnation as possible or probable. I do not regard the world's peace, and perfected machinery, and "blue coats with gilt buttons and white neckties with red borders," as evidence of dullness and stagnation. And I cannot believe the newspapers, whose proverbial energy is perennial, will ever get to the low ebb of stagnation he describes. But to the more important points. Three thousand years before this time messages had been successfully interchanged with the inhabitants of Mars, and now this message of "a dark star" arrives from Mars, which excites the astronomers, and later the people, until the whole world is in a frenzy of terror, apprehension and despair, watching this terrible star, which continued to increase. The people of Mars are also "in a state of extraordinary excitement," and our astronomers are much puzzled about the orbit of this dark star, many times the size of our earth. Then the Himalaya observatory sends out the startling announcement that, "the dark star has no orbit; but is falling toward the sun with great speed." Then a professor in physics sees the dangerous possibility of its collision with the sun, and has an immense vault, which had been previously built for scientific experiments, a hundred feet under ground, stored with provisions, etc. In this safe retreat he hides himself and his assistants when the dark star strikes the sun, and the fearful conflagration of the sun and earth occurs. And when the sun and earth were burned up by the collision of the dark star with the sun, they, like Noah and his family, were saved from the general destruction. The description of the melting of the houses, stones and all combustible material on the surface of the earth, the anguish and despair of the thronging multitudes, and the destruction of the great city of Hatten, built on the ruins of the old city of Neeork, would duplicate the horrors of Dante's "Inferno." The illustrations are equally horrible and terrific, and both are calculated to shock the mind of the reader and retard mental composure and æsthetic culture.