quator, waiting for the end to come.

The mere idea of the decay and death of the solar system almost brings
to one a cold shudder. All that sun's light and heat, which means so
much to us, entirely a thing of the past. A dark, cold ball rushing
along in space, accompanied by several dark, cold balls circling
ceaselessly around it. One of these a mere cemetery, in which there
would be no longer any recollection of the mighty empires, the loves and
hates, and all that teeming play of life which we call History.
Tombstones of men and of deeds, whirling along forgotten in the darkness
and silence. _Sic transit gloria mundi._

In that brilliant flight of scientific fancy, the _Time Machine_, Mr.
H.G. Wells has pictured the closing years of the earth in some such
long-drawn agony as this. He has given us a vision of a desolate beach
by a salt and almost motionless sea. Foul monsters of crab-like form
crawl slowly about, beneath a huge hull of sun, red and fixed in the
sky. The rocks around are partly coated with an intensely green
vegetation, like the lichen in caves, or the plants which grow in a
perpetual twilight. And the air is now of an exceeding thinness.

He dips still further into the future, and thus predicts the final form
of life:--

"I saw again the moving thing upon the shoal--there was no mistake now
that it was a moving thing--against the red water of the sea. It was a
round thing, the size of a football perhaps, or it may be bigger, and
tentacles trailed down from it; it seemed black against the weltering
blood-red water, and it was hopping fitfully about."

What a description of the "Heir of all the Ages!"

To picture the end of our world as the result of a cataclysm of some
kind, is, on the other hand, a form of speculation as intensely dramatic
as that with which we have just been dealing is unutterably sad.

It is not so many years ago, for instance, that men feared a sudden
catastrophe from the possible collision of a comet with our earth. The
unreasoning terror with which the ancients were wont to regard these
mysterious visitants to our skies had, indeed, been replaced by an
apprehension of quite another kind. For instance, as we have seen, the
announcement in 1832 that Biela's Comet, then visible, would cut through
the orbit of the earth on a certain date threw many persons into a
veritable panic. They did not stop to find out the real facts of the
case, namely, that, at the time mentioned, the