immortality. But the other side of the grave has the LAST say,
and we think it will discredit Haeckel. We should even undertake
to do that now and here in two columns of a yellow journal. But
we are DETERMINED before the column ends to ask you what you
think of our moon-earth-sun transmigration notion.

The sun is now a blazing mass, inconceivably huge, inconceivably
fierce in our eyes. Its flames leap hundreds of thousands of
miles into space. If our earth fell to the sun, it would melt as
a snow-flake falling upon a blazing forest. We certainly do not
readily look upon the sun as our future home, if we accept its
present condition as permanent.

But once upon a time, hundreds of millions of years back, this
earth used to look TO THE MOON, on a smaller scale, as the sun
now looks to us. If there were on the moon at that time inferior
human beings, in a low state of cosmic evolution, they
undoubtedly had to thank the earth for their life, as we thank
the sun. To them the earth, then incandescent, blazing with the
heat that now reveals itself through volcanoes, was simply a
whirling ball of fire, put in its place to warm them.

They could no more think that men would ever come to live here
than we can now think of moving on to the sun. ----

In course of time this earth cooled off. It cooled so thoroughly
that the moon died of cold. Life could no longer continue there.

The dead satellite's destiny thenceforward was to show gratitude
for past heat by moving our tides and cheering our poets. As