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214 but that everything to show we ever were shall perish too, seems an extinction too overpowering for words.

But vain regret avails not to change the universe's course. What is concerns us and what will be too. From facing it we cannot turn away. We may alleviate its poignancy by the thought that our interest is after all remote, affecting chiefly descendants we shall never know, and commend to ourselves the altruistic example so nobly set us by doctors of medicine who, on the demise of others at which—and possibly to which—they have themselves assisted, show a fortitude not easily surpassed, a fortitude extending even to their bills. If they can act thus unshaken at sight of their contemporaries, we should not fall behind them in heroism toward posterity.

Having in our last chapter run the gantlet of the geologists, we are in some sort fortified to face death—in a world—in this. The more so that we have some millenniums of respite before the execution of the decree. By the death of a planet we may designate that stage when all change on its surface, save disintegration, ceases. For then all we know as life in its manifold manifestations is at an end. To this it may come by many paths. For a planet, like a man, is exposed to death from a variety of untoward events.

Of these the one least likely to occur is death by accident. This, celestially speaking, is anything which