theory that Jupiter is really an extinguished sun which is now on the
way to become a planet in the terrestrial sense.

Not very long ago, as time is reckoned in astronomy, our sun, viewed
from the distance of the nearer fixed stars, may have appeared as a
binary star, the brighter component of the pair being the sun itself and
the fainter one the body now called the planet Jupiter. Supposing the
latter to have had the same intrinsic brilliance, surface for surface,
as the sun, it would have radiated one hundred times less light than the
sun. A difference of one hundredfold between the light of two stars
means that they are six magnitudes apart; or, in other words, from a
point in space where the sun appeared as bright as what we call a
first-magnitude star, its companion, Jupiter, would have shone as a
sixth-magnitude star. Many stars have companions proportionally much
fainter than that. The companion of Sirius, for instance, is at least
ten thousand times less bright than its great comrade.

Looking at Jupiter in this way, it interests us not as the probable
abode of intelligent life, but as a world in the making, a world,
moreover, which, when it is completed--if it ever shall be after the
terrestrial pattern--will dwarf our globe into insignificance. That
stupendous miracle of world-making which is dimly painted in the grand
figures employed by the writers of Genesis, and the composers of other
cosmogonic legends, is here actually going on before our eyes. The
telescope shows us in the cloudy face of Jupiter the moving of the
spirit upon the face of the great deep. What the final result will be we
can not tell, but clearly the end of the grand processes there in
operation has not yet been reached.

The interesting suggestion was made and urged by Mr. Proctor that if