Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/71



Our first business stage was the famous Atalanta, situated about the centre of what was once the old Atlantic Ocean, and now usually called the Birmingham of the world, on account of its vast hardware and energy factories. We have already filled up, let me here say, all our Atlantic, Pacific, and other old oceans, excepting certain great main lines, or broad canals, embracing the deeper sections, which still remain for sanitary considerations and purposes. How long future centuries, and future myriads of increasing humanity, will yet spare such watery spaces, I am not prepared to say. But, besides the sanitarian case, they afford in the mean time a picturesque aspect as seen from where we now are above, so far at least as any one at our considerable elevation can see through all the succession of layers of travel apparatus between us and the ground.

Of course, owing to all this travel-filled air, only a very reduced sunlight now reaches the earth's surface. But this is not of so much consequence nowadays, for several reasons. First, then, having mopped up nearly all the ocean waters, we are but little troubled with clouds or rain to diminish any of the light which the sun does send to us. Next, we have electric light everywhere available when wanted to supplement that of the sun, and to give us besides the purer light of the two, considering the well-known yellowish tint of our luminary, of which more further on; besides that, as we now perfectly separate heat from light, we can so much the more