30 THE WORLD MACHINE 



its peristaltic way, to sojourn in the valley of Ajalon, and the 

 sun, not then grown to its vast proportions, and more attentive 

 to the admonitions of the prophets, rested for a space upon 

 Gibeon, these stars would still be shining for us in the sky. 

 Or, in another way, though in a crash of colliding systems, some 

 mightier Sirius might have blazed out in the heavens thirty 

 centuries ago, its light would not yet have reached this earth 

 to tell us of the fact. 



A little dulled to wonder, the fabulous in science grow a 

 little stale, these disclosures we read with the nonchalance that 

 we skim the morning paper. They bring no stirring of the ancient 

 awe. But when two centuries ago the curtain was first drawn 

 aside, we shall not greatly wonder that the imaginative and 

 trembling soul of a Pascal, before such a vision of the infinite, 

 should recoil in fright. 



So with the conception of a plurality of worlds. It was hard 

 to think of, once. In the solitude of the cloister a Bruno hears 

 the message of Coppernicus, reflects, and flinging aside his 

 monkish robe, shouts across Europe : " The stars are suns." 

 For his crime the blazing faggots roast his quivering flesh. 

 To-day it is a commonplace of astronomy, and with it the belief 

 that round these suns swing myriads of planets like our own. 

 And if life is merely a stage of planetary evolution, then we 

 must conceive that in the desert distant ways there are count- 

 less earths like unto our own, and undergoing the same strange, 

 uncertain, fumbling, stumbling development of which this globe 

 is the theatre. 



Shrinking suns, dead moons, and dying worlds is cosmos 

 a clock that is running down ? May we look forward to a day 

 when, moons and meteors having fallen back into the planets 

 which gave them birth, the planets in turn into the suns of 

 which they were once a part ; the suns drawn inward into a 

 central mass, coalesced with the billions of other suns ; the 

 last star having shed its smokeless glow and gone out ; the 

 last particle of matter quivered with the last vibration of heat ; 

 the universe, a lifeless inert clod, sunk to the coldest cold of 

 space, shall be at rest at last ? Is such the prospect ? 



It may be ; there is no certainty. Spacing the starry ways 

 we find here and there a formless luminescence, faintly glowing 

 like a wisp of cloud that sometimes floats across a summer's 



