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the earth can be! As the seas dry the planetary orbits 

 widen, until at length the internal heat of the planet 

 equals the heat received by it from the sun. From this 

 moment the planet feels itself an independent unit in 

 cosmic life, and experiences a desire to unite in a cosmic 

 union. When at length such union takes place, the heat 

 of both globes in still further evolved, and the luminous 

 radiance throws out all the colours of the rainbow of 

 which I have spoken already, and these colours by 

 spectral analysis furnish transitions from the planetary 

 right up to the solar spectrum. 



When a double star turns into a sun it is hard to say 

 whether the two orbs are united in one, or whether only 

 the larger one is burning; but although astronomy has 

 not investigated this question and I am expressing my 

 own opinion for the first time from a scientific point of 

 view, judging by analogy I think we must come to the 

 conclusion that only the larger star becomes a sun and 

 the smaller remains free, for we observe that all the 

 suns visible from earth, excepting of course our own, 

 appear in the telescope as double stars. It may be that 

 what to the eye of the observer, on account of the 

 enormous distance, is an apparent pair; consists of a 

 real sun and its largest satellite; and if we take into con- 

 sideration the size of the planet Jupiter it seems likely 

 enough that our sun, viewed from some other system, 

 would also appear to be a double star. The transition of 

 a double star into a sun is the natural transition to the 

 family state, so that drawing an analogy between the life 

 of stars and that of mankind, our sun is a planet in the 

 ecstacy of birth; the mother of the little asteroids which 

 can just be distinguished among the outer planets where 

 they reflect the solar light. No doubt there are asteroids 

 also amongst the interior planets, i. c. between Mercury, 

 Venus and Earth, but for two reasons they cannot be 

 observed: in the first place, if they are in the same half 

 of the circuit with the orbit of passage of our earth they 

 cannot reflect the sun's light and if they occupy some 



