The magnetic link, invisible but powerful, joins our Earth to the central body of the solar system. Pœebus Apollo holds us in the hollow of his hand at a distance of 92 million miles, and we feel his pulse as he feels our feeble heart-beats. It is not only gravitation, nor only light, nor yet only heat, which throws a celestial bridge from the Sun to the Earth; it is also electricity; it is also magnetism; it is a force still unknown and unexplained which no doubt maintains communication between all the worlds. For the ethereal wave touches Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune as it touches us, and if we could utilise it we could communicate with our neighbours in the heavens. Interstellar magnetism! At each stage in the advance of science new horizons open out, unexpected perspectives reveal themselves, enlarging the field of our conquest over nature, but what we do know already is a mere nothing in comparison with what we are yet to know. What is the nature of the wave or substance which leaves the Sun and reaches the Earth to produce those agitations of the magnetic needle, those magnetic storms and auroræ boreales? Contemporary physics has been busy for twenty years about ions, electrons, and electric particles. The great perturbations described above are supposed to be due to the arrival in the upper atmosphere of torrents of electrons projected by the Sun and impinging upon the Earth with a speed of several thousand miles per second. The phenomenon is most intense when these emanations from the day-star hit the Earth directly. When they pass on one side, nothing out of the way happens. It may be that the torrent projected in a certain direction by the Sun on September 24 filled space in the direction of projection, and that our globe, travelling along its orbit at 67,000 miles an hour, only passed through that region on the following day. Ions and electrons, those convenient goblins of present-day physics, do they exist? Nobody has ever seen them. Perhaps they are only ingenious interpretations. What does certainly exist is electric force. We may also think of the repelling force exerted by the Sun, which blows so strongly upon the nuclei of comets and produces tails several million miles long and always in the direction opposed to the Sun. Electricity plays a great part in the appearance, the illumination, and the dislocation of comets’ tails, as we see nearly every year in the photographs taken at the Juvisy Observatory and which make such picturesque and suggestive revelations (it even plays a part in organic cells and among microbes). Whatever may be the real nature of the force in action, it is certain that the magnetic link differs from universal gravitation, but it is no less intimate and all-pervading. The twin forces of gravitational and magnetic attraction between worlds can only be likened to the universal force of love, which attracts souls towards each other.