Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/288

 Reduplication, so clearly and indisputably achieved by the venerable and immortal Black. But the discovery of the simple duplication is a less clear matter; for, in fact, tens of thousands put in their claims, as they had added fact after fact, each contributive to the great result, until that result seemed at last grasped simultaneously by them all.

No sooner was the new power publicly proclaimed and explained, than multitudes over the entire globe prepared to use it. Subject to the very exact astronomic calculations then attained to, messages began to be sent out in all directions, in order to get back our earth's aspects in past times; and those who were content with the briefer retrospects soon began, in this way, to harvest their due replies, and to exercise themselves in the new trade (afterwards so vast a business) of transferring the light-impress to the prepared surface of the quasi-photographic paper. But all this is rather what occurred in the after leisure of the earlier stages of the discovery; for the earliest excitements and the earliest efforts were directed to communications with our intelligent fellow-beings of outside worlds. This new and grand era, thus opened for our own little world, I must now deal with.

Which world, or which worlds, were we to begin with? The nearest, of course, was our moon. But our telescopes and spectroscopes had sufficiently assured us, by this time, that no intelligent life, at any rate no human life, was there, although we did afterwards, in