LUMEN. Exactly, and you are aware that the luminous ray sent to the Earth by the star _Capella_ takes seventy-two years in reaching it. It follows, therefore, that if we only receive the luminous ray to-day, which left its surface seventy-two years ago, the denizens of Capella see only that which happened on the Earth seventy-two years ago. The Earth reflects in space the light that it gets from the Sun, and from a distance, appears as brilliant as Venus and Jupiter appear to you, planets lighted by the same Sun that lights the Earth. The luminous aspect of the Earth, its photograph, journeys in space at the rate of 75,000 leagues a second, and only reaches Capella after seventy-two years of incessant travel. I recall these elementary principles in order that you may have them thoroughly fixed in your memory; you will then be able to comprehend, without difficulty, the facts which have happened to me during my ultra-terrestrial life since our last interview. QUÆRENS. These principles of optics are, to my mind, clearly established. The day after your death in October 1864, when, as you have confided to me, you found yourself rapidly transported to Capella, you were astonished to arrive there at the moment when the philosophical astronomers of the country were observing the Earth in the year 1793, and witnessing one of the most significant acts of the French Revolution. You were not less surprised to see yourself again as a child, running about in the streets of Paris. Then, leaving Capella and coming nearer to the Earth, you arrived at the zone where that part of the terrestrial photography passed before your vision, which showed you your infancy, and you saw yourself at six years of age, not in memory, but in reality. Out of all your previous revelations, this is the one I had the most difficulty in believing--I mean, in grasping its meaning. LUMEN. That which I now wish to make you comprehend is stranger still. But it was first necessary for you to admit that one, before I could adequately reveal to you this one. [Sidenote: Retrospective survey of life on Earth.] On leaving Capella and approaching the Earth, I saw again my seventy-two years of earthly existence, my entire life such as it had been, passed before me; for, in approaching the Earth, I passed through successive zones of earthly scenes, where I saw spread out as in a scroll the visible history of our planet, because in going back towards the Earth, I was continually meeting the various zones which carried through space the visible history of our planet, comprising that of Paris as well as my own, for I was there. Taking thus in one day a retrospective survey of the road which it had taken light seventy-two years to traverse, I had reviewed my whole life in that one day, and I perceived even my own interment.