Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/294

 our own system; while we had also, long ere this time, attained to the perfect transfer of the hues or colours of all photographed scenes. We could thus tell what life, if any, was upon the planets or moons of our system, and we were thus, so far, prepared for that actual personal intercourse to which the completing discovery of the Reduplication introduced us further on.

Whether for science purposes, or for those of business, or for mere leisurely recreative curiosity, our whole world was soon now transformed into a busy scene of "fishing" into all the past of the earth's history and surface aspects; and this fishing, as it is still called, has been carried on all these centuries since, even still more vigorously, as well as much more systematically, than at first; for as we gained in astronomico-mathematical precision, the results were ever more satisfactory, and were secured at ever less of energy-cost and energy-waste. Towards our own time, in this twenty-ninth century—all the astronomic movements, and their complex relative displacements, being so perfectly known and calculable, even to that latest of our attainments, the exact displacement, in speed and direction, due to our system's movement in space—it has become quite common for families to dip back for the matter of a hundred or a thousand years, in order to recall their ancestry when in the very act of some particular incident or event. Of course this is a marvellously precise calculation, and even now not