Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/389

 towards the solar equator, ever enclosing additional territory, where electrical disturbance above has sufficiently ceased for that purpose. This is a slow but a steady process. The steps are hardly appreciable under intervals of ten thousand solar-axial revolutions of twenty-five of our days each. Eventually the two great walls, approaching respectively from north and south, will meet at the solar equator, thus constituting the whole solar surface into Upper Solar territory, and making of our sun a world of entirely Upper Solar life.

The Upper Solars, it is inferred by us lower mortals, are able to calculate, quite accurately, alike the beginning and the duration of this result. Then comes a long reign of Upper Solar life, and an advance into knowledge far beyond ordinary human attainment. But the end comes at last in this as in all else. Indeed it has been foreseen from the beginning. The fires of all solar energy must at length burn out. There have been many instances in the past, and there will be many more in the future. But all this complex question of science, including that other of the contingency of the re-entrance of those burnt-out systems into light and heat, and a fresh career of life, by the collisions and other fortunes incidental to constant locomotion and gravity action—a problem in whose solution, by the way, we have of late made much progress—all this, I say, however interesting, must not further distract us at present. Suffice it to add, that the prospect, whether from afar, or as being close at hand, is always viewed alike philosophically by the Upper Solar minds. Their advanced science might long protract, by