B By Lewis Worthington Smith EHIND us the surge of midnight, silent and deep and black, I look from my little window, a splendor flying the dark. I look at a mist of branches, wind-stirred where the moon drops red. A farm-house lamp burns dimly. What issue of life or death The grasses are lush about them. They slip from the moving frame That circles the world before me, and then as I lose their glow The white of a mile-post passes, sepulchral and cold as snow. What matter the things that have been? What lure has the dark and dead? I follow the flaring glory, the light on the track ahead. At the unseen turn of midnight I pass to another day. A moment the hand is doubtful, and then we are forward sped On, on through the widening radiance, the light on the track ahead. W THE END OF THE WORLD By WINTHROP PACKARD HAT will be the end of the world? This is a question which was formerly asked of soothsayers and prophets and often answered by them with definite statements and dates which were, to those who believed them, to the last degree disquieting. Such prophets and prophecies have all been proved erroneous and the Millerites and their kin have all been laughed out of serious consideration. Science has taught us better, and yet science which seeks always new facts and revised reasoning is now teaching us that our faith in the safety of the solar system is misplaced. Instead of the eternally changeless procession of the planets about the sun and of our solar system about some other, greater sun, astronomers find grave evidence of what seems disorder in what we thought was perpetual perfection, a disorder which may, indeed probably will, sometime wreck Our own planet. It is possible astronomically considered it is probable -that, unseen within the remote 24 confines of space the vast mass of a dead world is hurtling toward our sun with inconceivable velocity. In time the two will come together and the immeasurable heat produced will make gas of granite and floating clouds of nebulae of us all; for thus worlds die and thus they are immediately in process of being born again, for out of the condensation of this nebula will come the beginnings of a new solar system which will, in the countless aeons of astronomical time, go through the same process of evolution and decay. PROFESSOR PERCIVAL LOWELL, LL. D. That worlds grow up, grow old, die and in time are thus at once destroyed. and revitalized, is the substance of a series of lectures recently delivered by Dr. Percival Lowell, the foremost astronomer of modern times, a series that has attracted extraordinary interest. Dr. Lowell has made a profound study of Mars, our nearest neighbor, and has added to the knowledge of the world many startling new facts concerning this planet. He in no way encourages sensationalism, and takes care to back conservative opinion with well established facts. WONDERFUL SPIRAL NEBULA IN ANDROMEDA. Photo made with a two-foot telescope. ing together of dead suns. Thus was evolved our own solar system with its fiery centre, its known planets including the earth, and as we begin now to know, a vast host of unseen worlds or fragments with which the inter-stellar space about us seems to be crowded. So crowded are these that if a balloonist supplied with oxygen for breathing and heat sufficient to sustain life in the intense cold, could attain a height of a hundred miles above the earth he would perish for his rashness, bombarded to death by flying fragments of frozen planets of all sizes from that of a brickbat upward. Now and then we are apprised of the number of these flying fragments by the sudden deflection of more than the usual number to the earth. Then for the first time we see them clearly as they glow for a brief moment with the only individual life that they have, fused from dead miniature worlds to tiny suns for a second or two, then falling inert again to earth. Thus we see single meteors or showers of them. Almost all these meteorites are dissipated into vanishing gases by the heat of their own passage generated by the friction of the air, but some of the larger ones fall to earth as dead cinders and are found. These weigh from a few pounds up to many tons. In a single meteoric shower the number of meteors which appeared in the earth's atmosphere was estimated at 240,000. Astronomy is built upon mathematics, and astronomical calculation has given us as much in exact knowledge, perhaps, as astronomical observation. Indeed, in many instances it has been able to reach |