GENERAL URANOGRAPHY.

Space and time. — Matter.

— The laws and the forces.

— The primary creation.

— The universal creation.

— The suns and the planets.

— The satellites.

— The comets.

— The Milky Way.

— The fixed stars.

— The deserts of space.

— Eternal succession of the worlds.

— Universal life.

— Diversity of the worlds.

SPACE AND TIME.

— Many definitions of space have already been given, the principal one being this: space is the extent that separates two bodies.

From which certain sophists deduced that where there are no bodies there will be no space; 3 it was upon this that some doctors of theology based themselves to establish that space is necessarily finite, alleging that a certain number of finite bodies could not form an infinite series and that, where the bodies ended, space would likewise end.

They also defined space as being the place where the worlds move, the void where matter acts, etc. Let us leave all these definitions, which define nothing, in the treatises where they repose.

Space is one of those words that express a primitive and axiomatic idea, evident in itself, and with regard to which the various definitions one may give do nothing more than obscure it.

We all know what space is, and I wish only to affirm that it is infinite, so that our subsequent studies may not encounter a barrier opposing the investigations of our gaze.

Now, I say that space is infinite, for the reason that it is impossible to imagine any limit to it and because, despite the difficulty we encounter in conceiving the infinite, it is easier for us to advance eternally through space, in thought, than to stop at any point, beyond which we would no longer find extent to traverse.

To picture, as far as our limited faculties permit, the infinity of space, let us suppose that, setting out from the Earth, lost in the midst of the infinite, toward some point of the Universe, with the prodigious speed of the electric spark, which traverses thousands of leagues per second, and that, having traversed millions of leagues scarcely after having left this globe, we find ourselves in a place from which we barely discern it under the aspect of a pale star.

An instant having passed, still following the same direction, we arrive at those distant stars that you barely perceive from your terrestrial station. From there, not only does the Earth entirely disappear from our gaze in the depths of the heavens, but the Sun itself, with all its splendor, has been eclipsed by the extent that separates us from it.

Still animated by the same lightning speed, at each step we advance into the extent, we cross over systems of worlds, islands of ethereal light, stellar roads, sumptuous regions where God sowed worlds in the same profusion with which he sowed the plants in the terrestrial meadows.

Now, it is but a few minutes that we have been traveling, and already hundreds of millions of millions of leagues separate us from the Earth, billions of worlds have passed before our sight, and yet, listen! in reality, we have not advanced a single step in the Universe.

If we continue for years, centuries, thousands of centuries, millions of hundred-times-secular periods and always with the same lightning speed, we shall likewise not have advanced a single step, whatever the side toward which we direct ourselves and whatever the point toward which we make our way, starting from that invisible little grain from which we set out and which we call the Earth.

That is what space is!

— Time, like the word space, is also a term already defined in itself; one forms a more exact idea of it by relating it to the infinite whole.

Time is the succession n of things; 3 it is linked to eternity in the same way that things are linked to the infinite.

Let us suppose ourselves at the origin of our world, at the primitive epoch when the Earth did not yet move under the divine impulse; in a word: at the beginning of the Genesis.

Time had then not yet emerged from the mysterious cradle of Nature, and no one can say at what epoch of centuries we find ourselves, since the pendulum of the centuries had not yet been set in motion.

But, silence! the first hour of an isolated Earth sounds on the eternal bell, the planet moves in space and from then on there is evening and morning.

Beyond the Earth, eternity remains impassive and immobile, although time marches with respect to many other worlds.

For the Earth, time replaces it and during a determined series of generations the years and the centuries will be counted.

Let us now transport ourselves to the last day of that world, to the hour when, bowed under the weight of decrepitude, it will be effaced from the book of life to reappear there no more; the succession of events is then interrupted; the terrestrial movements that measured time cease and time ends with them.

This simple exposition of the things that give birth to time, that nourish it, and let it become extinct, suffices to show that, seen from the point at which we have had to place ourselves for our studies, time is a drop of water that falls from the cloud into the sea and whose fall is measured.

As many worlds in the vast immensity, so many diverse and incompatible times.

Outside the worlds, eternity alone replaces these ephemeral successions and tranquilly fills with its immobile light the immensity of the heavens.

Immensity without limits and eternity without limits, such are the two great properties of universal nature.

The gaze of the observer, who traverses, without ever encountering anything to detain it, the immeasurable distances of space, and that of the geologist, who ascends beyond the limits of the ages, or who descends into the depths of eternity with gaping jaws, where both will one day lose themselves, act in concordance, each in his own direction, to acquire this double notion of the infinite: extent and duration.

Within this order of ideas, it will be easy for us to conceive that, time being only the relation of transitory things and depending solely on the things that are measured, if we took the terrestrial centuries as a unit and piled them up by the thousands, to form a colossal number, that number would never represent more than a point in eternity, in the same way that thousands of leagues added to thousands of leagues give no more than a point in extent.

Thus, for example, the centuries being outside the ethereal life of the soul, we could write a number as long as the terrestrial equator and suppose ourselves aged by that number of centuries, without our soul in reality counting one day more; 17 and joining, to that indefinable number of centuries, a series of similar numbers, long as from here to the Sun, or still more considerable, if we imagined ourselves living during a prodigious succession of secular periods represented, by the addition of such numbers, when we arrived at the term, the inconceivable heap of centuries that would have passed over our heads would be as if it did not exist: before us would always stand the whole of eternity.

Time is only a relative measure of the succession of transitory things; 19 eternity is not susceptible of any measure, 20 from the point of view of duration; for it, there is neither beginning nor end: all is present to it.

If centuries of centuries are less than a second, relatively to eternity, what can the duration of human life be?!

MATTER.

— At first sight, there is nothing that appears so profoundly varied, nor so essentially distinct, as the diverse substances that compose the world.

Among the objects that Art or Nature daily make pass before our gaze, will there be two that reveal perfect identity, or even parity, of composition?

What dissimilarity, under the aspects of solidity, of compressibility, of weight, and of the multiple properties of bodies, between the atmospheric gases and a thread of gold, between the watery molecule of the cloud and that of the mineral that forms the bony framework of the globe! What diversity between the chemical fabric of the varied plants that adorn the vegetable kingdom and that of the no less numerous representatives of animality on the Earth!

Nevertheless, we can establish as an absolute principle that all substances, known and unknown, however dissimilar they may appear, whether from the point of view of intimate constitution, or through the prism of their reciprocal actions, are, in fact, only diverse modes under which matter presents itself; varieties into which it is transformed under the direction of the innumerable forces that govern it.

— Chemistry, whose progress was so rapid after my time, n when its own adepts still relegated it to the secret domain of magic; a science that may justly be considered the daughter of the century of observation and based solely, in a manner much more solid than its elder sisters, on the experimental method;

Chemistry, I say, made a clean slate of the four primitive elements that the ancients agreed to recognize in Nature; it showed that the terrestrial element is nothing more than the combination of diverse substances varied to infinity; that air and water are equally decomposable and products of a certain number of equivalents of gas; that fire, far from being also a principal element, is only a state of matter, resulting from the universal movement to which it is submitted and from a combustion that is perceptible or latent.

In compensation, it brought forth a considerable number of principles, until then unknown, which appeared to it to form, by determined combinations, the diverse substances, the diverse bodies that it studied and which act simultaneously, according to certain laws and in certain proportions, in the works that are accomplished within the great laboratory of Nature.

It gave to these principles the name of simple bodies, indicating in such a way that it considers them primitive and indecomposable and that no operation, to this day, can reduce them to relatively simpler fractions than they themselves. n

— But, where the appreciations of man halt, even aided by the most impressive artificial senses, the work of Nature continues; where the common man takes the appearance for reality, where the practitioner lifts the veil and perceives the beginning of things, the gaze of him who can apprehend the manner in which Nature acts sees, in the constitutive materials of the world, only the primitive cosmic matter, simple and one, diversified in certain regions at the epoch of their appearance, distributed into bodies bound to one another, while they have life, and which one day will dismember themselves, through the effects of decomposition, in the receptacle of extent.

— There are questions that we ourselves, Spirits who love Science, cannot fathom and on which we shall be able to emit only personal opinions, more or less hypothetical. On these questions, I shall be silent, or I shall justify my way of seeing.

The one with which we are occupied, however, does not belong to that number. To those, therefore, who might be tempted to see in my words only a bold theory, I shall say: embrace, if it be possible, with investigative gaze, the multiplicity of the operations of Nature and you will recognize that, if we do not admit the unity of matter, it will be impossible to explain, I shall not say only the suns and the spheres, but, without going so far, the germination of a seed in the earth, or the production of an insect.

— If so great a diversity is observed in matter, it is because, the forces that have presided over its transformations and the conditions in which these were produced being unlimited in number, the various combinations of matter likewise could not but be unlimited.

Therefore, whether the substance considered belongs to the fluids properly so called, that is, to the imponderable bodies, or whether it bears the characters and the ordinary properties of matter, there is, in the whole Universe, but a single primitive substance; the cosmos, or the cosmic matter of the uranographers. [See question 27 of The Spirits' Book.]

THE LAWS AND THE FORCES.

— If one of those unknown beings that consume their ephemeral existence in the depths of the dark regions of the ocean; if one of those polygastrics, one of those nereids — mere animalcules that of Nature know nothing more than the ichthyophagous fishes and the submarine forests — were suddenly to receive the gift of intelligence, the faculty of studying its world and of basing its appreciations on conjectural reasoning extended to the universality of things, what idea would it form of the living nature that develops in the medium it inhabits and of the terrestrial world that escapes the field of its observations?

If, now, by the marvelous effect of the power of its new faculty, that same being came to raise itself, above its eternal darkness, to scale the surface of the sea, not far from the opulent shores of an island of splendid vegetation, bathed by the fecundating Sun, dispenser of beneficial heat, what judgment would it form of its anticipated theories about the universal creation?

Would it not banish them at once, replacing them with a broader appreciation, relatively as incomplete as the first? Such, O men, is the image of your wholly speculative science. n

— Coming, then, to treat here of the question of the laws and the forces that govern the Universe, I, who am only, like you, a being relatively ignorant, in the face of real science, despite the apparent superiority that, with regard to my brothers on Earth, comes to me from the possibility of studying natural problems that are forbidden to them in the position in which they find themselves as inhabitants of the Earth, I bring as my sole objective to give you a general notion of the universal laws, without explaining in detail the manner of action and the nature of the special forces that are dependent on them.

— There is an ethereal fluid that fills space and penetrates bodies; this fluid is the ether or primitive cosmic matter, generator of the world and of beings.

Inherent in it are the forces that presided over the metamorphoses of matter, the immutable and necessary laws that govern the world.

These multiple forces, indefinitely varied according to the combinations of matter, localized according to the masses, diversified in their modes of action, according to the circumstances and the environments, are known on Earth under the names of gravity, cohesion, affinity, attraction, magnetism, active electricity; 4 the vibratory movements of the agent are known under the names of sound, heat, light, etc.

In other worlds, they present themselves under other aspects, reveal other characters unknown on Earth and, in the immense immensity of the heavens, forces in indefinite number have developed on an unimaginable scale, whose grandeur we are as incapable of evaluating as is the crustacean, in the depths of the ocean, of apprehending the universality of terrestrial phenomena. n

Now, just as there is only one simple, primitive substance, generator of all bodies, but diversified in its combinations, so too all these forces depend on one universal law diversified in its effects and which, by the eternal designs, was sovereignly imposed upon the Creation, to imprint upon it harmony and stability.

— Nature is never found in opposition to itself.

One alone is the motto of the coat of arms of the Universe:

UNITY ———————— VARIETY

Ascending the scale of the worlds, one finds unity of harmony and of creation, at the same time as an infinite variety in the immense garden of stars; 4 in traversing the degrees of life, from the lowest of beings up to God, the great law of continuity is made manifest; 5 in considering the forces in themselves, one can form with them a series, whose resultant, merging with the generatrix, is the universal law.

You cannot appreciate this law in all its extent, because the forces that represent it in the field of your observations are restricted and limited; nevertheless, gravitation and electricity may be considered as a broad application of the primordial law, which reigns beyond the heavens.

All these forces are eternal — we shall explain this term [item 13] — and universal, like the Creation; being inherent in the cosmic fluid,

they necessarily act in all things and everywhere, modifying their actions by simultaneity or by succession, predominating here, fading away there, mighty and active at certain points, latent or hidden at others, but, ultimately, preparing, directing, conserving and destroying the worlds in their diverse periods of life, governing the marvelous works of Nature, wherever they may be executed, ensuring forever the eternal splendor of the Creation.

THE PRIMARY CREATION.

— After having considered the Universe under the general points of view of its composition, of its laws and of its properties, we can extend our studies to the mode of formation that gave origin to the worlds and to beings; we shall descend, next, to the creation of the Earth, in particular, and to its present state in the universality of things and from there, taking that globe as a point of departure and as a relative unit, we shall proceed to our planetary and sidereal studies.

— If we have well understood the relation, or rather, the opposition between eternity and time, 2 if we have familiarized ourselves with the idea that time is no more than a relative measure of the succession of transitory things, 3 whereas eternity is essentially one, immobile and permanent, insusceptible of any measure, from the point of view of duration, 4 we shall understand that for it there is neither beginning nor end.

Otherwise, if we form an exact though necessarily very feeble idea of the infinity of the divine power, we shall understand how it is possible that the Universe has always existed and always exists.

Since God existed, his eternal perfections spoke.

Before the times had been born, the immeasurable eternity received the divine word and fecundated space, eternal as itself.

— Existing, by his nature, from all eternity, God created from all eternity and it could not be otherwise, 2 since, however distant the epoch to which we draw back, by the imagination, the supposed limits of the Creation, there will always be, beyond that limit, an eternity, 3 — ponder this idea well — an eternity during which the divine hypostases, the infinite volitions would have remained buried in mute, inactive and infecund lethargy, an eternity of apparent death for the eternal Father who gives life to beings; of indifferent muteness for the Word that governs them; of cold and selfish sterility for the Spirit of love and vivification.

Let us better understand the grandeur of the divine action and its perpetuity under the hand of the absolute Being! God is the Sun of beings, he is the Light of the world.

Now, the appearance of the Sun gives instantaneous birth to waves of light that spread on all sides, into the extent; in the same way, the Universe, born of the Eternal, ascends to unimaginable periods of the infinity of duration, to the Fiat lux! of the beginning.

— The absolute beginning of things ascends, then, to God; their successive appearances in the domain of existence constitute the order of the perpetual Creation.

What mortal could speak of the unknown magnificences superbly veiled under the night of the ages that unfolded in those ancient times, when none of the marvels of the present Universe existed; in that primitive epoch when, the voice of the Lord having made itself heard, the materials that in the future were to aggregate by themselves and symmetrically, to form the temple of Nature, suddenly found themselves in the bosom of the infinite voids; when that mysterious voice, which every creature venerates and esteems as that of a mother, produced harmoniously varied notes, to go and vibrate together and modulate the concert of the immense heavens!

The world, at its birth, did not present itself established in its virility and in the fullness of its life, no: the creating power never contradicts itself and, like all things, the Universe was born a child.

Invested with the laws mentioned above and with the initial impulse inherent in its very formation, the primitive cosmic matter caused there to be born successively whirlwinds, agglomerations of that diffuse fluid, heaps of nebulous matter that split by themselves and modified themselves to infinity to generate, in the immeasurable regions of the immensity, diverse centers of simultaneous or successive creations.

In virtue of the forces that predominated over one or another of them and of the ulterior circumstances that presided over their developments, these primitive centers became foci of a special life: some, less disseminated in space and richer in principles and in active forces, began at once their particular astral life; the others, occupying unlimited extent, grew with extreme slowness, or again divided themselves into other secondary centers.

— Transporting ourselves to but a few millions of centuries above the present epoch, we ascertain that our Earth does not yet exist, that even our solar system has not yet begun the evolutions of planetary life; but that, nevertheless, splendid suns already illuminate the ether; 2 inhabited planets already give life and existence to a multitude of beings, our predecessors in the human career, 3 that the opulent productions of an unknown nature and the marvelous phenomena of the heavens unfold, under other gazes, the tableaux of the immense Creation.

What am I saying! splendors have already ceased to exist that long before made the heart of other mortals palpitate, under the thought of the infinite power!

And we, poor little beings, who came after an eternity of life, we believe ourselves contemporaries of the Creation!

Once more; let us better understand Nature. Let us know that behind us, as before us, is eternity, that space is the theater of an unimaginable succession and simultaneity of creations.

Such nebulae, which we barely perceive at the most distant points of the heavens, are agglomerations of suns in process of formation; such others are milky ways of inhabited worlds; others, finally, seats of catastrophes and of decay.

Let us know that, just as we are placed in the midst of an infinity of worlds, so too we are in the midst of a double infinity of durations, anterior and ulterior; that the universal Creation is not restricted to us, that it is not permitted us to apply that expression to the isolated formation of our tiny globe. THE UNIVERSAL CREATION.

— After having ascended, as far as our weakness permitted, toward the hidden source from which the worlds emanate, as the drops of water from a river, let us consider the march of the successive creations and of their serial developments.

The primitive cosmic matter contained the material, fluidic and vital elements of all the universes that display their magnificences before eternity; 3 it is the fecund mother of all things, the first grandmother and, above all, the eternal generatrix.

That substance from which the sidereal spheres proceed has absolutely not disappeared; that power has not died, since it still, incessantly, gives birth to new creations and incessantly receives, reconstituted, the principles of the worlds that are effaced from the eternal book.

The ethereal substance, more or less rarefied, that is diffused through the interplanetary spaces; that cosmic fluid that fills the world, more or less rarefied, in the immense regions, opulent with agglomerations of stars; more or less condensed where the astral sky does not yet shine; more or less modified by diverse combinations, according to the localities of the extent, is nothing more than the primitive substance in which the universal forces reside, from which Nature has drawn all things. n

— That fluid penetrates bodies, like an immense ocean.

It is in it that resides the vital principle that gives origin to the life of beings and perpetuates it in each globe, according to the condition of the latter, a principle that, in a latent state, keeps itself dormant where the voice of a being does not call it.

Every creature, mineral, vegetable, animal or any other — for there are many other natural kingdoms, of whose existence you do not even suspect — knows, in virtue of that vital and universal principle, how to appropriate the conditions of its existence and of its duration.

The molecules of the mineral have a certain sum of that life, in the same way as the seed of the embryo, and they group themselves, as in the organism, into symmetrical figures that constitute the individuals.

It matters greatly that we be imbued with the notion that the primitive cosmic matter was invested, not only with the laws that ensure the stability of the worlds, but also with the universal vital principle that forms spontaneous generations in each world, in proportion as the conditions of the successive existence of beings present themselves and when the hour sounds for the appearance of the children of life, during the creating period.

The universal Creation is thus effected. It is, then, exact to say that, the operations of Nature being the expression of the divine will, God has always created, creates incessantly and will never cease to create.

— Up to here, however, we have kept silence about the spiritual world, which also forms part of the Creation and fulfills its destinies according to the august prescriptions of the Lord.

Concerning the mode of the creation of the Spirits, however, I cannot impart more than a very restricted teaching, in virtue of my own ignorance and also because I still have to keep silence with regard to certain questions, even though it has already been granted me to fathom them.

To those who desire religiously to know and show themselves humble before God, I shall say, begging them, nevertheless, to base no premature system on my words, the following: The Spirit does not come to receive the divine illumination, which gives it, simultaneously with free will and conscience, the notion of its high destinies, without having passed through the divinely fatal series of the inferior beings, among which the work of its individualization is slowly elaborated; 4 only from the day on which the Lord imprints on its brow his august type does the Spirit take its place in the bosom of the humanities.

Again I ask: do not build upon my words your reasonings, so sadly celebrated in the history of metaphysics; I would prefer a thousand times to keep silence on such elevated questions, so far above our ordinary meditations, than to expose you to distort the sense of my teaching and to cast you, through my fault, into the inextricable labyrinths of deism or of fatalism.

THE SUNS AND THE PLANETS.

— It came to pass that, at a point of the Universe, lost among the myriads of worlds, the cosmic matter condensed under the form of an immense nebula, this animated by the universal laws that govern matter. In virtue of these laws, notably of the molecular force of attraction, it took the form of a spheroid, the only one that a mass of matter isolated in space can assume.

The circular movement produced by gravitation, rigorously equal, of all the molecular zones toward the center, soon modified the primitive sphere, in order to lead it, from movement to movement, to the lenticular form. We speak of the ensemble of the nebula.

— New forces arose in consequence of that movement of rotation: the centripetal force and the centrifugal force, the first tending to unite all the parts at the center, the second tending to drive them away from it.

Now, the movement accelerating, in proportion as the nebula condenses, and its radius increasing, in proportion as it approaches the lenticular form, the centrifugal force, incessantly developed by these two causes, predominated at once over the central attraction.

Just as a too rapid movement of the sling breaks its cord, the projectile going to fall far off, so too the predominance of the centrifugal force detached the equatorial ring of the nebula and from that ring a new mass was formed, isolated from the first, but, nevertheless, submitted to its empire.

That mass conserved its equatorial movement which, modified, became for it a movement of translation around the solar star. Moreover, its new state gives it a movement of rotation around its own center.

— The generatrix nebula, which gave origin to that new world, condensed and resumed the spherical form; but, as the primitive heat, developed by its diverse movements, was attenuated only with extreme slowness, the phenomenon we have just described will reproduce itself many times and during a long period, as long as the nebula has not become dense enough, solid enough, to offer efficacious resistance to the modifications of form that its movement of rotation successively imprints upon it.

It, then, will not have given birth to a single star, but to hundreds of worlds detached from the central focus, issued from it by the mode of formation mentioned above.

Now, each of its worlds, invested, like the primitive world, with the natural forces that preside over the creation of the universes, will successively generate new globes that from then on will gravitate around it, just as it, together with its brothers, gravitates around the focus that gave them existence and life.

Each of these worlds will be a Sun, center of a whirlwind of planets successively detached from its equator. These planets will receive a special, particular life, although dependent on the star that generated them.

— The planets are thus formed of masses of condensed, but not yet solidified, matter, detached from the central mass by the action of centrifugal force and which take, in virtue of the laws of movement, the spheroidal form, more or less elliptical, according to the degree of fluidity they conserved.

One of these planets will be the Earth which, before cooling and clothing itself with a solid crust, will give birth to the Moon, by the same process of astral formation to which it itself owed its existence; 3 the Earth, henceforth inscribed in the book of life, cradle of creatures whose weakness the wings of divine Providence protect, a new string placed on the infinite harp and which, in the place it occupies, has to vibrate in the universal concert of the worlds. THE SATELLITES.

— Before the planetary masses had attained a degree of cooling sufficient to operate their solidification, smaller masses, true liquid globules, detached themselves from some of them in the equatorial plane, the plane in which the centrifugal force is greatest, and, by effect of the same laws, acquired a movement of translation around the planet that generated them, as happened to the latter with respect to the central star that gave them origin.

It was thus that the Earth gave birth to the Moon, whose mass, less considerable, had to undergo a more rapid cooling.

Now! the laws and the forces that presided over the fact of its detaching itself from the terrestrial equator, and its movement of translation in the same plane, acted in such a way that that world, instead of clothing itself with the spheroidal form, took that of an ovoid globe, that is, the elongated form of an egg, with the center of gravity fixed in the lower part.

— The conditions in which the disaggregation of the Moon was effected permitted it little to move away from the Earth and constrained it to keep itself perpetually suspended in its firmament, like an ovoid figure whose heavier parts formed the lower face turned toward the Earth and whose less dense parts constituted for it the apex, if by that word one designates the face that, on the side opposite to the Earth, rises toward the heavens. It is this that makes that star always present to us the same face. To better understand its geological state, it may be compared to a globe of cork, having the face turned toward the Earth formed of lead.

Hence, two natures essentially distinct on the surface of the lunar world: one, without any analogy with ours, since the fluidic and ethereal bodies are unknown to it; the other, light, relatively to the Earth, since all the less dense substances made their way toward that hemisphere. The first, perpetually turned toward the Earth, without waters and without atmosphere, except, here and there, at the limits of that subterrestrial hemisphere; the other, rich in fluids, perpetually opposed to our world. n

— The number and the state of the satellites of each planet have varied according to the special conditions in which they were formed. Some gave origin to no secondary star, as is verified with Mercury, Venus and Mars, whereas others, like the Earth, Jupiter, Saturn, etc., formed one or several of these secondary stars.

— Besides its satellites or moons, the planet Saturn presents the special phenomenon of the ring which, seen from afar, seems to encircle it with a sort of white halo. That ring is, indeed, the result of a separation that was operated in the equator of Saturn, still in primitive times, in the same way that an equatorial zone escaped from the Earth to form its satellite.

The difference consists in that the ring of Saturn was formed, in all its parts, of homogeneous molecules, probably already in a certain state of condensation, and was able, in that way, to continue its movement of rotation in the same direction and in a time almost equal to that which animates the planet.

If one of the points of that ring had remained denser than another, one or several agglomerations of substance would have suddenly been operated and Saturn would count several satellites more. Since the epoch of its formation, that ring has solidified, in the same way as the other planetary bodies. THE COMETS.

— Wandering stars, the comets, even more than the planets, which conserved the etymological denomination, will be the guides that will help us to cross the limits of the system to which the Earth belongs and will lead us to the distant regions of the sidereal extent.

But, before exploring the celestial domains, with the aid of these travelers of the universe, it will be well that we make known, as far as possible, their intrinsic nature and the role that falls to them in the planetary economy [organization].

— Some have seen, in these stars endowed with a head of hair, nascent worlds, elaborating, in the primitive chaos in which they find themselves, the conditions of life and of existence, which fall to the lot of the inhabited lands; others imagined that these extraordinary bodies were worlds in a state of destruction and, for many, the singular appearance they have was the motive of erroneous appreciations about their nature, this to such a point that there was no one, including in judicial astrology, who did not consider them as presagers of misfortunes, sent, by providential designs, to the Earth, frightened and trembling.

— The law of variety is applied on so large a scale in the works of Nature, that it is astonishing that the naturalists, the astronomers and the philosophers have fabricated so many systems to assimilate the comets to the planetary stars and to see in them only stars in degrees more or less advanced, of development or of decrepitude.

Nevertheless, the tableaux of Nature ought amply to suffice to turn the observer away from the preoccupation of inquiring into nonexistent relations and to leave to the comets the modest, but useful, role of wandering stars, that serve as explorers to the solar empires.

For, the celestial bodies of which we treat are something very different from the planetary bodies; they do not have as their destination, like these, to serve as habitation to humanities. They go successively from suns to suns, enriching themselves, at times, along the way, with planetary fragments reduced to the state of vapor, to draw, at the solar foci, the vivifying and renewing principles that they pour over the terrestrial worlds. (Chap. IX, no. 12.)

— If, when one of these stars approaches our tiny globe, to cross its orbit and return to its apogee, situated at an immeasurable distance from the Sun, we accompanied it, in thought, to visit with it the sidereal provinces, we would cross the prodigious extent of ethereal matter that separates the Sun from the nearest stars and, observing the combined movements of that star, which one would suppose strayed in the infinite desert, we would still find there an eloquent proof of the universality of the laws of Nature, which act at distances that the most active imagination can barely conceive.

There, the elliptical form takes the parabolic form and the march becomes so slow that the comet comes to traverse no more than a few meters, in the same time during which, at its perigee, it traversed many thousands of leagues.

Perhaps a more powerful sun, more important than the one it has just left, exercises over that comet a preponderant attraction and receives it into the category of its subjects. Then, on your tiny Earth, in vain the frightened children will await its return, which they had predicted, basing themselves on incomplete observations.

In that case, we, who in thought accompany the wandering comet to those unknown regions, will come upon a new nation, that terrestrial gazes cannot find, unimaginable for the Spirits who inhabit the Earth, inconceivable even for their minds, since it will be the theater of unexplored marvels.

We have arrived at the astral world, at that dazzling world of the vast suns that radiate through infinite space and that are the brilliant flowers of the magnificent garden of the Creation. Having arrived there, we shall scarcely know what the Earth is.

[1] This chapter was textually extracted from a series of communications dictated to the Spiritist Society of Paris, in 1862 and 1863, under the title — Uranographic studies and signed GALILEO. Medium: Mr. C. F. (Translator's Note: These are the initials of the name of Camille Flammarion.)

[2] [Today we would say that time is the measure of the succession of facts or events]

[3] [Galileo, who dictated these uranographic studies, lived between 1564 and 1642.]

[4] The principal simple bodies are: among the non-metallic ones, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, chlorine, carbon, phosphorus, sulfur, iodine; among the metallic ones, gold, silver, platinum, mercury, lead, tin, zinc, iron, copper, arsenic, sodium, potassium, calcium, aluminum, etc.

[5] Such also is the situation of the deniers of the world of the Spirits, when, after having divested themselves of the carnal envelope, they contemplate, unfolded before their sight, the horizons of that world. They understand, then, how hollow were the theories with which they pretended to explain everything exclusively by means of matter. Nevertheless, these horizons still conceal from them mysteries that are only later unveiled to them, in proportion as, purifying themselves, they elevate themselves. From their first moments in the other world, however, they see themselves forced to recognize their own blindness and how far they were from the truth. [6] We refer everything to what we know and of that which escapes the perception of our senses we understand no more than the man blind from birth understands about the effects of light and the utility of the eyes. It is possible, then, that in other environments, the cosmic fluid may possess properties, that may be susceptible of combinations of which we form no idea, may produce effects appropriate to needs that we do not know, giving rise to new perceptions or to other modes of perception. We do not understand, for example, that one can see without the eyes of the body and without light. But who tells us that there do not exist other agents, besides light, to which special organisms are adapted? Somnambulistic sight, which neither distance, nor material obstacles, nor obscurity detain, offers us an example of this. Let us suppose that, in some world, the beings are normally what our somnambulists are only exceptionally; they, without needing our light, nor our eyes, will see what we cannot see. The same occurs with all the other sensations. The conditions of vitality and of perceptibility, the sensations and the needs vary in conformity with the environments. [7] If you should ask what is the principle of these forces and how this principle can be in the very substance that produces it, we would answer that mechanics offers us numerous examples of this fact. Elasticity, which causes a spring to distend, is it not in the spring itself and does it not depend on the mode of aggregation of the molecules? The body that obeys the centrifugal force receives its impulse from the primitive movement that was imprinted upon it. [8] This theory of the Moon, entirely new, explains, by the law of gravitation, the reason why that star always presents the same face to the Earth. Having the center of gravity at one of the points of its surface, instead of being at the center of the sphere, and being, in consequence, attracted toward the Earth by a force greater than that which attracts the lighter parts, the Moon may be regarded as one of those figures commonly called tumbler-dolls, which constantly raise themselves upon their base, whereas the planets, whose center of gravity is at equal distances from the surface, turn regularly upon their own axis. The vivifying fluids, gaseous or liquid, by virtue of their specific lightness, would be found accumulated in the upper hemisphere, perennially opposed to the Earth. The lower hemisphere, the only one we see, would be devoid of such fluids and, for that reason, improper to the life that, nevertheless, would reign in the other. If, then, the upper hemisphere is inhabited, its inhabitants have never seen the Earth, unless they make an excursion through the other, which would be impossible for them, since the latter lacks the conditions indispensable to vitality. However rational and scientific that theory may be, since it has not yet been confirmed by any direct observation, it can be accepted only by way of hypothesis and as an idea capable of serving as a marker to Science. One cannot, however, but agree that it is the only one, up to the present, that gives a satisfactory explanation of the particularities that the lunar globe presents.