Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/55

 future discovery, we should attain to knowledge and power as yet undreamt of. This cross-electric power would be efficacious alike to pour out unlimited food from our chemical laboratories, and to propel us at incalculable speed over the outside universe. The science of the future was to carry us far outside our pigmy world, on the wings of cross-electrified energy, and at or beyond the lightning's pace. And, again, Black's idea was that life and mind reign all over the universe, at least in all those worlds which possess an aerial or liquid medium, or both, in which life might develop, after the various primitive forces, originally convulsive, to use his learned phrase, had subsided into equilibrium. What may seem to our constitutions impossible extremes of heat or cold, may not prevent this universal life, but only perhaps vary the substances taken up into the vital structure, or affect the pace or the particular direction of physical or mental development. Thus, it was not impossible that the sun itself might be peopled. There might possibly be a solid and settled, albeit, to our feeling, a somewhat hot world of life and mind beneath, perhaps far beneath, the still mysterious photosphere. We might indulge this view, at any rate, as long as this striking photospheric feature remained unexplained. Indeed, Black would add, the photosphere itself might be just this cross-electricity ever staring us every day in the face.

Then, again, Black would throw out some curious speculations upon coloured suns and coloured-light systems. The stars, of course, were all suns, with their respective planets and moons whirling round them, and their organized life throughout, ascending