Part + 

II + 

I + 

The events which we have just described, and the discussions to which they gave rise, took place in the twenty-fifth century of the Christian era. Humanity was not destroyed by the shock of the comet, although this was the most memorable event in its entire history, and one never forgotten, notwithstanding the many transformations which the race has since undergone. The Earth had continued to rotate and the Sun to shine; little children had become old men, and their places had been filled by others in the eternal succession of generations. Centuries and ages had succeeded each other, and humanity, slowly advancing in knowledge and happiness, through a thousand transitory interruptions, had reached its apogee and accomplished its destiny. + 

But how vast these series of transformations⁠—physical and mental! + 

The population of Europe, from the year 1900 to the year 3000, had increased from 375 to 700 millions; that of Asia, from 875 to 1000 millions; that of the Americas, from 120 to 1,500 millions; that of Africa, from 75 to 200 millions; that of Australia, from 5 to 60 millions; which, for the total population of the globe, gives an increase of 2,010 millions. And this increase had continued, with some fluctuations. + 

Language had become transformed. The never-ceasing progress of science and industry had created a large number of new words, generally of Greek derivation. At the same time, the English language had spread over the entire world. From the twenty-fifth to the thirtieth centuries, the spoken language of Europe was based upon a mixture of English, of French, and of Greek derivatives. Every effort to create artificially a new universal language had failed. + 

Long before the twenty-fifth century, war had disappeared, and it became difficult to conceive how a race which pretended to knowledge and reason could have endured so long the yoke of clever rascals who lived at its expense. In vain had later sovereigns proclaimed, in high-sounding words, that war was a divine institution; that it was the natural result of the struggle for existence; that it constituted the noblest of professions; that patriotism was the chief of virtues. In vain were battlefields called fields of honor; in vain were the statues of the victors erected in the most populous cities. It was, at last, observed that, with the exception of certain ants, no animal species had set an example of such boundless folly as the human race; that the struggle for life did not consist in slaughtering one another, but in the conquest of nature; that all the resources of humanity were absolutely wasted in the bottomless gulf of standing armies; and that the mere obligation of military service, as formulated by law, was an encroachment upon human liberty, so serious that, under the guise of honor, slavery had been reestablished. + 

Men perceived that the military system meant the maintenance of an army of parasites and idlers, yielding a passive obedience to the orders of diplomats, who were simply speculating upon human credulity. In early times, war had been carried on between villages, for the advantage and glory of chieftains, and this kind of petty warfare still prevailed in the nineteenth century, between the villages of central Africa, where even young men and women, persuaded of their slavery, were seen, at certain times, to present themselves voluntarily at the places where they were to be sacrificed. Reason having, at last, begun to prevail, men had then formed themselves into provinces, and a warfare between provinces arose⁠—Athens contending with Sparta, Rome with Carthage, Paris with Dijon; and history had celebrated the glorious wars of the Duke of Burgundy against the king of France, of the Normans against the Parisians, of the Belgians against the Flemish, of the Saxons against the Bavarians, of the Venetians against the Florentines, etc., etc. Later, nations had been formed, thus doing away with provincial flags and boundaries; but men continued to teach their children to hate their neighbors, and citizens were accoutred for the sole purpose of mutual extermination. Interminable wars arose, wars ceaselessly renewed, between France, England, Germany, Italy, Spain, Austria, Russia, Turkey, etc. The development of weapons of destruction had kept pace with the progress of chemistry, mechanics, aeronautics, and most of the other sciences, and theorists were to be found, especially among statesmen, who declared that war was the necessary condition of progress, forgetting that it was only the sorry heritage of barbarism, and that the majority of those who have contributed to the progress of science and industry, electricity, physics, mechanics, etc., have all been the most pacific of men. Statistics had proved that war regularly claimed forty million victims per century, 1,100 per day, without truce or intermission, and had made 1,200 million corpses in three thousand years. It was not surprising that nations had been exhausted and ruined, since in the nineteenth century alone they had expended, to this end, the sum of 700,000 million francs. These divisions, appealing to patriotic sentiments skillfully kept alive by politicians who lived upon them, long prevented Europe from imitating the example of America in the suppression of its armies, which consumed all its vital forces and wasted yearly more than ten thousand million francs of the resources acquired at such sacrifice by the laborer, and from forming a United States of Europe. But though man could not make up his mind to do away with the tinsel of national vanity, woman came to his rescue. + 

Under the inspiration of a woman of spirit, a league was formed of the mothers of Europe, for the purpose of educating their children, especially their daughters, to a horror of the barbarities of war. The folly of men, the frivolity of the pretexts which arrayed nations against each other, the knavery of statesmen who moved heaven and earth to excite patriotism and blind the eyes of peoples; the absolute uselessness of the wars of the past and of that European equilibrium which was always disturbed and never established; the ruin of nations; fields of battle strewn with the dead and the mangled, who, an hour before, lived joyously in the bountiful sun of nature; widows and orphans⁠—in short, all the misery of war was forced upon the mind, by conversation, recital and reading. In a single generation, this rational education had freed the young from this remnant of animalism, and inculcated a sentiment of profound horror for all which recalled the barbarism of other days. Still, governments refused to disarm, and the war budget was voted from year to year. It was then that the young girls resolved never to marry a man who had borne arms; and they kept their vow. + 

The early years of this league were trying ones, even for the young girls: for the choice of more than one fell upon some fine-looking officer, and, but for the universal reprobation, her heart might have yielded. There were, it is true, some desertions; but, as those who formed these marriages were, from the outset, despised and ostracized by society, they were not numerous. Public opinion was formed, and it was impossible to stem the tide. + 

For about five years there was scarcely a single marriage or union. Every citizen was a soldier, in France, in Germany, in Italy, in Spain, in every nation of Europe⁠—all ready for a confederation of States, but never recoiling before questions represented by the national flag. The women held their ground; they felt that truth was on their side, but their firmness would deliver humanity from the slavery which oppressed it, and that they could not fail of victory. To the passionate objurgations of certain men, they replied: “No; we will have nothing more to do with fools;” and, if this state of affairs continued, they had decided to keep their vow, or to emigrate to America, where, centuries before, the military system had disappeared. + 

The most eloquent appeals for disarmament were made at every session to the committee of administrators of the state, formerly called deputies or senators. Finally, after a lapse of five years, face to face with this wall of feminine opposition, which, day by day, grew stronger and more impregnable, the deputies of every country, as if animated by a common motive, eloquently advocated the cause of women, and that very week disarmament was voted in Germany, France, Italy, Austria and Spain. + 

It was springtime. There was no disorder. Innumerable marriages followed. Russia and England had held aloof from the movement, the suffrage of women in these countries not having been unanimous. But as all the states of Europe were formed into a republic the ensuing year, uniting in a single confederated state, on the invitation of the government of the United States of Europe, these two great nations also decreed a gradual disarmament. Long before this time, India had been lost to England, and the latter had become a republic. As for Russia, the monarchical form of government still existed. It was then the middle of the twenty-fourth century, and from that epoch the narrow sentiment of patriotism was replaced by the general one of humanity. + 

Delivered from the ball and chain of military slavery, Europe had immediately gotten rid of the bureaucracy which had also exhausted nations, condemned to perish, as it were, by plethora. But for this a radical revolution was necessary. From that time on, Europe had advanced as by magic in a marvellous progress⁠—social, scientific, artistic and industrial. Taxation, diminished by nine-tenths, served only for the maintenance of internal order, the security of life and property, the support of schools, and the encouragement of new researches. But individual initiative was far more effective than the old-time official centralization which for so many years had stifled individual effort, and bureaucracy was dead and buried. + 

At last one breathed freely, one lived. In order to pay 700,000 millions every century to citizens withdrawn from all productive work, and to maintain the bureaucracy, governments had been obliged to increase taxation to a fearful degree. The result was that everything was taxed; the air one breathes, the water one drinks, the light and heat of the sun, bread, wine and every article of food, clothing, houses, the streets of cities, the country roads, animals, horses, oxen, dogs, cats, hens, rabbits, birds in cages, plants, flowers, musical instruments, pianos, organs, violins, zithers, flutes, trumpets, trades and professions, the married and the unmarried, children, furniture⁠—everything, absolutely everything; and this taxation had grown until it equalled the net product of all human labor, with the single exception of the “daily bread.” Then, all work had ceased. It seemed thenceforth impossible to live. It was this state of affairs which led to the great social revolution of the international socialists, of which mention was made at the beginning of this book, and to others which followed it. But these upheavals had not definitely liberated Europe from the barbarism of bygone days, and it was to the young women’s league that humanity owes its deliverance. + 

The unification of nations, of ideas, of languages, had brought about also that of weights and measures. No nation had resisted the universal adoption of the metric system, based upon the dimensions of the planet itself. A single kind of money was in circulation. One initial meridian ruled in geography. This meridian passed through the observatory of Greenwich, and at its antipode the day changed its name at noon. + 

Nations which we call modern had vanished like those of the past. France had disappeared in the twenty-eighth century, after an existence of about two thousand years. Germany disappeared in the thirty-second; Italy in the twenty-ninth; England had spread over the surface of the ocean. + 

Meteorology had attained the precision of astronomy, and about the thirtieth century the weather could be predicted without error. + 

The forests, sacrificed to agriculture and the manufacture of paper, had entirely disappeared. + 

The legal rate of interest had fallen to one-half of one percent. + 

Electricity had taken the place of steam. Railroads and pneumatic tubes were still in use, but only for the transportation of freight. Voyages were made preferably by dirigible balloons, aeroplanes and airships, especially in the daytime. + 

This very fact of aerial navigation would have done away with frontiers if the progress of reason had not already abolished them. Constant intercourse between all parts of the globe had brought about internationalism, and the absolutely free exchange of goods and ideas. Customhouses had been suppressed. + 

The telephonoscope disseminated immediately the most important and interesting news. A comedy played at Chicago or Paris could be heard and seen in every city of the world. + 

Astronomy had attained its end: the knowledge of the life of other worlds and the establishment of communication with them. All philosophy, all religion, was founded upon the progress of astronomy. + 

Marvellous instruments in optics and physics had been invented. A new substance took the place of glass, and had yielded the most unexpected results to science. New natural forces had been conquered. + 

Social progress had been no less great than that of science. Machines driven by electricity had gradually taken the place of manual labor. At the same time the production of food had become entirely revolutionized. Chemical synthesis had succeeded in producing sugar, albumen, the amides and fats, from the air, water and vegetables, and, by skillfully varying the proportions, in forming the most advantageous combinations of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, so that sumptuous repasts no longer consisted of the smoking remains of slaughtered animals⁠—beef, veal, lamb, pork, chicken, fish and birds⁠—but were served amid the harmonies of music in rooms adorned with plants ever green and flowers ever in bloom, in an atmosphere laden with perfumes. Freed from the vulgar necessity of masticating meats, the mouth absorbed the principles necessary for the repair of organic tissues in exquisite drinks, fruits, cakes and pills. + 

About the thirtieth century, especially, the nervous system began to grow more delicate, and developed in unexpected ways. Woman was still somewhat more narrow-minded than man, and her mental operations differed from his as before (her exquisite sensibility responding to sentimental considerations before reason could act in the lower cells), and her head had remained smaller, her forehead narrower; but the former was so elegantly placed upon a neck of such supple grace, and rose so nobly from the shoulders and the bust, that it compelled more than ever the admiration of man, not only as a whole, but also by the penetrating sweetness and beauty of the mouth and the light curls of its luxuriant hair. Although comparatively smaller than that of man, the head of woman had nevertheless increased in size with the exercise of the intellectual faculties; but the cerebral circonvolutions had experienced the most change, having become more numerous and more pronounced in both sexes. In short, the head had grown, the body had diminished in size. Giants were no longer to be seen. + 

Four permanent causes had modified insensibly the human form; the development of the intellectual faculties and of the brain, the decrease in manual labor and bodily exercise, the transformation of food, and the marriage system. The first had increased the size of the cranium as compared with the rest of the body; the second had decreased the strength of the limbs; the third had diminished the size of the abdomen and made the teeth finer and smaller; the tendency of the fourth had been rather to perpetuate the classic forms of human beauty: masculine beauty, the nobility of an uplifted countenance, and the graceful outlines of womanhood. About the two hundredth century of our era, a single race existed, rather small in stature, light colored, in which anthropologists might, perhaps, have discovered some form of Anglo-Saxon and Chinese descent. + 

Humanity had tended towards unity, one race, one language, one general government, one religion. There were no more state religions; only the voice of an enlightened conscience, and in this unity former anthropological differences had disappeared. + 

In former ages poets had prophesied that in the marvellous progress of things man would finally acquire wings, and fly through the air by his muscular force alone; but they had not studied the origin of anthropomorphic structure and had forgotten that for a man to have at the same time arms and wings, he must belong to a zoölogical order of sextupeds which does not exist on our planet; for man belongs to the quadrupeds, a type which has been gradually modified. But though he had not acquired new natural organs, he had acquired artificial ones, to say nothing of his physical transformation. He had conquered the region of the air and could soar in the sky by light apparatus, whose motor power was electricity, and the atmosphere had become his domain as it had been that of the birds. It is very probable that if in the course of ages a winged race could have acquired, by the development of its faculties of observation, a brain analogous to that of even the most primitive man, it would have soon dominated the human species and replaced it by a new one⁠—a winged race of the same zoölogical type as the quadrupeds and bipeds. But the force of gravity is an obstacle to any such organic development of the winged species, and humanity, grown more perfect, had remained master of the world. + 

At the same time, in the lapse of ages, the animal population of the globe had completely changed. The wild species, lions, tigers, hyenas, panthers, elephants, giraffes, kangaroos, as also whales and seals, had become extinct. + 

II + 

About the one hundredth century of the Christian era all resemblance between the human race and monkeys had disappeared. + 

The nervous sensibility of man had become intensified to a marvellous degree. The sense of sight, of hearing, of smell, of touch, and of taste, had gradually acquired a delicacy far exceeding that of their earlier and grosser manifestations. Through the study of the electrical properties of living organisms, a seventh sense, the electric sense, was created outright, so to speak; and everyone possessed the power of attracting and repelling both living and inert matter, to a degree depending upon the temperament of the individual. But by far the most important of all the senses, the one which played the greatest role in men’s relation to each other, was the eighth, the psychic sense, by which communication at a distance became possible. + 

A glimpse has been had of two other senses also, but their development had been arrested from the very outset. The first had to do with the visibility of the ultra violet rays, so sensitive to chemical tests, but wholly invisible to the human eye. Experiments made in this direction has resulted in the acquisition of no new power, and had considerably impaired those previously enjoyed. The second was the sense of orientation; but every effort made to develop it had proved a failure, notwithstanding the attempt to make use of the results of researches in terrestrial magnetism. + 

For some time past, the offspring of the once titled and aristocratic classes of society had formed a sickly and feeble race, and the governing body was recruited from among the more virile members of the lower class, who, however, were in their turn soon enervated by a worldly life. Subsequently, marriages were regulated on established principles of selection and heredity. + 

The development of man’s intellectual faculties, and the cultivation of psychical science, had wrought great changes in humanity. Latent faculties of the soul had been discovered, faculties which had remained dormant for perhaps a million years, during the earlier reign of the grosser instincts, and, in proportion as food based upon chemical principles was substituted for the coarse nourishment which had prevailed for so long a time, these faculties came to light and underwent a brilliant development. As a mental operation, thought became a different thing from what it now is. Mind acted readily upon mind at a distance, by virtue of a transcendental magnetism, of which even children knew how to avail themselves. + 

The first interastral communication was with the planet Mars, and the second with Venus, the latter being maintained to the end of the world; the former was interrupted by the death of the inhabitants of Mars; whereas intercourse with Jupiter was only just beginning as the human race neared its own end. A rigid application of the principles of selection in the formation of marriages had resulted in a really new race, resembling ours in organic form, but possessing wholly different intellectual powers. For the once barbarous and often blind methods of medicine, and even of surgery, had been substituted by those derived from a knowledge of hypnotic, magnetic and psychic forces, and telepathy had become a great and fruitful science. + 

Simultaneously with man the planet also had been transformed. Industry had produced mighty but ephemeral results. In the twenty-fifth century, whose events we have just described, Paris had been for a long time a seaport, and electric ships from the Atlantic, and from the Pacific by the Isthmus of Panama, arrived at the quays of the abbey of Saint Denis, beyond which the great capital extended far to the north. The passage from the abbey of Saint Denis to the port of London was made in a few hours, and many travellers availed themselves of this route, in preference to the regular air route, the tunnel, and the viaduct over the channel. Outside of Paris the same activity reigned; for, in the twenty-fifth century also, the canal uniting the Mediterranean with the Atlantic had been completed, and the long detour by way of the Straits of Gibraltar had been abandoned; and on the other hand a metallic tube, for carriages driven by compressed air, united the Iberian republic, formerly Spain and Portugal, with western Algeria, formerly Morocco. Paris and Chicago then had nine million inhabitants, London, ten; New York, twelve. Paris, continuing its growth toward the west from century to century, now extended from the confluence of the Marne beyond St. Germain. All great cities had grown at the expense of the country. Agricultural products were manufactured by electricity; hydrogen was extracted from seawater; the energy of waterfalls and tides were utilized for lighting purposes at a distance; the solar rays, stored in summer, were distributed in winter, and the seasons had almost disappeared, especially since the introduction of heat wells, which brought to the surface of the soil the seemingly inexhaustible heat of the Earth’s interior. + 

But what is the twenty-fifth century in comparison with the thirtieth, the fortieth, the hundredth! + 

Everyone knows the legend of the Arab of Kazwani, as related by a traveller of the thirteenth century, who at that time, moreover, had no idea of the duration of the epochs of nature. “Passing one day,” he said, “by a very ancient and very populous city, I asked one of its inhabitants how long a time it had been founded. ‘Truly,’ he replied, ‘it is a powerful city, but we do not know how long it has existed, and our ancestors are as ignorant upon this subject as we.’ + 

“Five centuries later I passed by the same spot, and could perceive no trace of the city. I asked a peasant who was gathering herbs on its former site, how long it had been destroyed. ‘Of a truth,’ he replied, ‘that is a strange question. This field has always been what it now is.’ ‘But was there not formerly a splendid city here?’ I asked. ‘Never,’ he answered, ‘at least so far as we can judge from what we have seen, and our fathers have never told us of any such thing.’ + 

“On my return five hundred years later to the same place I found it occupied by the sea; on the shore stood a group of fishermen, of whom I asked at what period the land had been covered by the ocean. ‘Is that question worthy of a man like you?’ they replied; ‘this spot has always been such as you see it today.’ + 

“At the end of five hundred years I returned again, and the sea had disappeared. I inquired of a solitary man whom I encountered, when this change had taken place; and he gave me the same reply. + 

“Finally, after an equal lapse of time, I returned once more, to find a flourishing city, more populous and richer in monuments than that which I had at first visited; and when I sought information as to its origin, its inhabitants replied: ‘The date of its foundation is lost in antiquity. We do not know how long it has existed, and our fathers knew no more of this than we do.’ ” + 

How this fable illustrates the brevity of human memory and the narrowness of our horizons in time as well as in space! We think that the Earth has always been what it now is; we conceive with difficulty of the secular changes through which it has passed; the vastness of these periods overwhelms us, as in astronomy we are overwhelmed by the vast distances of space. + 

The time had come when Paris had ceased to be the capital of the world. + 

After the fusion of the United States of Europe into a single confederation, the Russian republic from St. Petersburg to Constantinople had formed a sort of barrier against the invasion of the Chinese, who had already established populous cities on the shores of the Caspian sea. The nations of the past having disappeared before the march of progress, and the nationalities of France, England, Germany, Italy and Spain having for the same reason passed away, communication between the east and west, between Europe and America, had become more and more easy; and the sea being no longer an obstacle to the march of humanity, free now as the Sun, the new territory of the vast continent of America had been preferred by industrial enterprise to the exhausted lands of western Europe, and already in the twenty-fifth century the center of civilization was located on the shores of Lake Michigan in a new Athens of nine million inhabitants, rivalling Paris. Thereafter the elegant French capital had followed the example of its predecessors, Rome, Athens, Memphis, Thebes, Nineveh and Babylon. The wealth, the resources of every kind, the great attractions, were elsewhere. + 

In Spain, Italy and France, gradually abandoned by their inhabitants, solitude spread slowly over the ruins of former cities. Lisbon had disappeared, destroyed by the sea; Madrid, Rome, Naples and Florence were in ruins. A little later, Paris, Lyons and Marseilles were overtaken by the same fate. + 

Human types and languages had undergone such transformations that it would have been impossible for an ethnologist or a linguist to discover anything belonging to the past. For a long time neither Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, English nor German had been spoken. Europe had migrated beyond the Atlantic, and Asia had invaded Europe. The Chinese to the number of a thousand million had spread over western Europe. Mingling with the Anglo-Saxon race, they formed in some measure a new one. Their principal capital stretched like an endless street along each side of the canal from Bordeaux to Toulouse and Narbonne. + 

The causes which led to the foundation of Lutetia on an island in the Seine, which had raised this city of the Parisians to the zenith of its power in the twenty-fifth century, were no longer operative, and Paris had disappeared simultaneously with the causes to which it owed its origin and splendor. Commerce had taken possession of the Mediterranean and the great oceanic highways, and the Iberian canal had become the emporium of the world. + 

The littoral of the south and west of ancient France had been protected by dikes against the invasion of the sea, but, owing to the increase of population in the south and southwest, the north and northwest had been neglected, and the slow and continual subsidence of this region, observed ever since the time of Caesar, had reduced its level below that of the sea; and as the channel was ever widening, and the cliffs between Cape Helder and Havre were being worn away by the action of the sea, the Dutch dikes had been abandoned to the ocean, which had invaded the Netherlands, Belgium, and northern France, Amsterdam, Utrecht, Rotterdam, Antwerp, Versailles, Lille, Amiens and Rouen had sunk below the water, and ships floated above their sea-covered ruins. + 

Paris itself, finally abandoned in the sixtieth century, when the sea had surrounded it as it now does Havre, was, in the eighty-fifth century, covered with water to the height of the towers of Notre Dame, and all that memorable plain, where were wrought out, during so many years, the most brilliant of the world’s civilizations, was swept by angry waves. + 

As in the case of languages, ideas, customs and laws, so, also, the manner of reckoning time had changed. It was still reckoned by years and centuries, but the Christian era had been discarded, as also the holy days of the calendar and the eras of the Mussulman, Jewish, Chinese and African chronologies. There was now a single calendar for the entire race, composed of twelve months, divided into four equal trimesters of three months of thirty-one, thirty, and thirty days, each trimester containing exactly thirteen weeks. New Year’s Day was a fête day, and was not reckoned in with the year; every bisextile year there were two. The week had been retained. Every year commenced on the same day⁠—Monday; and the same dates always corresponded to the same days of the week. The year began with the vernal equinox all over the world. The era, a purely astronomical division of time, began with the coincidence of the December solstice with perihelion, and was renewed every 25,765 years. This rational method had succeeded the fantastic divisions of time formerly in use. + 

The geographical features of France, of Europe and of the entire world had become modified, from century to century. Seas had replaced continents, and new deposits at the bottom of the ocean covered the vanished ages, forming new geological strata. Elsewhere, continents had taken the place of seas. At the mouth of the Rhone, for example, where the dry land had already encroached upon the sea from Arles to the littoral, the continent gained to the south; in Italy, the deposits of the Po had continued to gain upon the Adriatic, as those of the Nile, the Tiber, and other rivers of later origin, had gained upon the Mediterranean; and in other places the dunes had increased, by various amounts, the domain of the dry land. The contours of seas and continents had so changed that it would have been absolutely impossible to make out the ancient geographical maps of history. + 

The historian of nature does not deal with periods of five centuries, like the Arab of the thirteenth century mentioned in the legend related a moment ago. Ten times this period would scarcely suffice to modify, sensibly, the configuration of the land, for five thousand years are but a ripple on the ocean of time. It is by tens of thousands of years that one must reckon if one would see continents sink below the level of seas, and new territories emerging into the sunlight, as the result of the secular changes in the level of the Earth’s crust, whose thickness and density varies from place to place, and whose weight, resting upon the still plastic and mobile interior, causes vast areas to oscillate. A slight disturbance of the equilibrium, an insignificant dip of the scales, a change of less than a hundred meters, often, in the length of the Earth’s diameter of twelve thousand kilometers, is sufficient to transform the surface of the world. + 

And if we examine the ensemble of the history of the Earth, by periods of one hundred thousand years, for example, we see, that in ten of these great epochs, that is, in a million years, the surface of the globe has been many times transformed. + 

If we advance into the future a period of one or two million years, we witness a vast flux and reflux of life and things. How many times in this period of ten or twenty thousand centuries, how many times have the waves of the sea covered the former dwelling-places of man! How many times the Earth has emerged anew, fresh and regenerated, from the abysses of the ocean! In primitive times, when the still warm and liquid planet was covered only by a thin shell, cooling on the surface of the burning ocean within, these changes took place brusquely, by sudden breaking down of natural barriers, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and the uprising of mountain ranges. Later, as this superficial crust grew thicker and became consolidated, these transformations were more gradual; the slow contraction of the Earth had led to the formation of hollow spaces within the solid envelope, to the falling in of portions of this envelope upon the liquid nucleus, and finally to oscillating movements which had changed the profile of the continents. Later still, insensible modifications had been produced by external agents; on the one hand the rivers, constantly carrying to their mouths the debris of the mountains, had filled up the depths of the sea and slowly increased the area of the dry land, making in time inland cities of ancient seaports; and on the other hand, the action of the waves and of storms, constantly eating away the shores, had increased the area of the ocean at the expense of the dry land. Ceaselessly the geographical configuration of the shore had changed. For the historian our planet had become another world. Everything had changed: continents, seas, shores, races, languages, customs, body and mind, sentiments, ideas⁠—everything. France beneath the waves, the bottom of the Atlantic in the light of the Sun, a portion of the United States gone, a continent in the place of Oceanica, China submerged; death where was life, and life where was death; and everywhere sunk into eternal oblivion all which had once constituted the glory and greatness of nations. If today one of us should emigrate to Mars, he would find himself more at home than if, after the lapse of these future ages, he should return to the Earth. + 

III + 

While these great changes in the planets were taking place, humanity had continued to advance; for progress is the supreme law. Terrestrial life, which began with the rudimentary protozoans, without mouths, blind, deaf, mute and almost wholly destitute of sensation, had acquired successively the marvellous organs of sense, and had finally reached its climax in man, who, having also grown more perfect with the lapse of centuries, had risen from his primitive savage condition as the slave of nature to the position of a sovereign who ruled the world by mind, and who had made it a paradise of happiness, of pure contemplation, of knowledge and of pleasure. + 

Men had attained that degree of intelligence which enabled them to live wisely and tranquilly. After a general disarmament had been brought about, so rapid an increase in public riches and so great an amelioration in the well-being of every citizen was observed, that the efforts of intelligence and labor, no longer wasted by this intellectual suicide, had been directed to the conquest of new forces of nature and the constant improvement of civilization. The human body had become insensibly transformed, or more exactly, transfigured. + 

Nearly all men were intelligent. They remembered with a smile the childish ambitions of their ancestors whose aspiration was to be someone rather than something, and who had struggled so feverishly for outward show. They had learned that happiness resides in the soul, that contentment is found only in study, that love is the sun of the heart, that life is short and ought not to be lived superficially; and thus all were happy in the possession of liberty of conscience, and careless of those things which one cannot carry away. + 

Woman had acquired a perfect beauty. Her form had lost the fullness of the Greek model and had become more slender; her skin was of a translucent whiteness; her eyes were illuminated by the light of dreams; her long and silky hair, in whose deep chestnut were blended all the ruddy tints of the setting sun, fell in waves of rippling light; the heavy animal jaw had become idealized, the mouth had grown smaller, and in the presence of its sweet smile, at the sight of its dazzling pearls between the soft rose of the lips, one could not understand how lovers could have pressed such fervent kisses upon the lips of women of earlier times, specimens of whose teeth, resembling those of animals, had been preserved in the museums of ethnography. It really seemed as if a new race had come into existence, infinitely superior to that to which Aristotle, Kepler, Victor Hugo, Phryne, or Diana of Poictiers had belonged. + 

Thanks to the progress in physiology, hygiene, and antiseptic science, as well as to the general well-being and intelligence of the race the duration of human life had been greatly prolonged, and it was not unusual to see persons who had attained the age of 150 years. Death had not been conquered, but the secret of living without growing old had been found, and the characteristics of youth were retained beyond the age of one hundred. + 

But one fatherland existed on the planet, which, like a chorus heard above the chords of some vast harmony, marched onward to its high destiny, shining in the splendor of intellectual supremacy. + 

The internal heat of the globe, the light and warmth of the Sun, terrestrial magnetism, atmospheric electricity, interplanetary attraction, the psychic forces of the human soul, the unknown forces which preside over destinies⁠—all these science had conquered and controlled for the benefit of mankind. The only limits to its conquests were the limitations of the human faculties themselves, which, indeed, are feeble, especially when we compare them with those of certain extraterrestrial beings. + 

All the results of this vast progress, so slowly and gradually acquired by the toil of centuries, must, in obedience to a law, mysterious and inconceivable for the petty race of man, reach at last their apogee, when further advance becomes impossible. The geometric curve which represents this progress of the race, falls as it rises: starting from zero, from the primitive nebulous cosmos, ascending through the ages of planetary and human history to its lofty summit, to descend thereafter into a night that knows no morrow. + 

Yes! all this progress, all this knowledge, all this happiness and glory, must one day be swallowed up in oblivion, and the voice of history itself be forever silenced. Life had a beginning: it must have an end. The sun of human hopes had risen, had ascended victoriously to its meridian, it was now to set and to disappear in endless night. To what end then all this glory, all this struggling, all these conquests, all these vanities, if light and life must come to an end? + 

Martyrs and apostles, in every cause, have poured out blood upon the Earth, destined also in its turn to perish. + 

Everything is doomed to decay, and death must remain the final sovereign of the world. Have you ever thought, in viewing a village cemetery, how small it is, to contain the generations buried there from time immemorable? Man existed before the last glacial epoch, which dates back 200,000 years; and the age of man extends over a period of more than 250,000 years. Written history dates from yesterday. Cut and polished flints have been found at Paris, proving the presence of man on the banks of the Seine long before the first historic record of the Gauls. The Parisians of the close of the nineteenth century walk upon ground consecrated by more than ten thousand years of ancestry. What remains of all who have swarmed in this forum of the world? What is left of the Romans, the Greeks, and the Asiatics, whose empires lasted for centuries? What remains of the millions who have existed? Not even a handful of ashes. + 

A human being dies every second, or about 86,000 a day, and an equal number, or to speak more exactly, a little more than 86,000 are born daily. This figure, true for the nineteenth century, applies to a long period, if we increase it proportionately to the time. The population of the globe has increased from epoch to epoch. In the time of Alexander there were perhaps a thousand million living beings on the surface of the Earth. At the end of the nineteenth century fifteen hundred million; in the twenty-second century two thousand million; in the twenty-ninth three thousand million; at its maximum the population of the globe had reached one hundred thousand million. Then it had begun to decrease. + 

Of the innumerable human bodies which have lived, not one remains. All have been resolved into their elements, which have again formed new individuals. + 

All that fills the passing day⁠—labor, pleasure, grief and happiness⁠—vanishes with it into oblivion. Time flies, and the past exists no longer; what has been, has disappeared in the gulf of eternity. The visible world is vanishing every instant. Only the invisible is real and enduring. + 

During the ten million years of history, the human race, surviving generation after generation, as if it were a real thing, had been greatly modified from both a physical and moral point of view. It had always remained master of the world, and no new race had aspired to its sovereignty; for races do not come down from heaven or rise from hell; no Minerva is born full-armed, no Venus awakes full-grown in a shell of pearl on the seashore; everything grows, and the human race, with its long line of ancestry, was from the very beginning the natural result of the vital evolution of the planet. Under the law of progress, it had emerged from the limbo of animalism, and by the continued action of this same law of progress it had become gradually perfected, modified and refined. + 

But the time had come when the conditions of terrestrial life began to fail; when humanity, instead of advancing, was itself to enter upon its downward path. + 

The internal heat of the globe, still considerable in the nineteenth century, although it had ceased to have any effect upon surface temperature, which was maintained solely by the Sun, had slowly diminished, and the Earth had, at last, become entirely cold. This had not directly influenced the physical conditions of terrestrial life, which continued to depend upon the atmosphere and solar heat. The cooling of the Earth cannot bring about the end of the world. + 

Imperceptibly, from century to century, the Earth’s surface had become levelled. The action of the rain, snow, frost and solar heat upon the mountains, the waters of torrents, rivulets and rivers, had slowly carried to the sea the debris of every continental elevation. The bottom of the sea had risen, and in nine million years the mountains had almost entirely disappeared. Meanwhile, the planet had grown old faster than the Sun; the conditions favorable to life had disappeared more rapidly than the solar light and heat. + 

This conception of the planet’s future conforms to our present knowledge of the universe. Doubtless, our logic is radically incomplete, puerile even, in comparison with the real and eternal Truth, and might be justly compared with that of two ants talking together about the history of France. But, confessing the modesty which befits the finite in presence of the infinite, and acknowledging our nothingness as compared with the universe, we cannot avoid the necessity of appearing logical to ourselves; we cannot assume that the abdication of reason is a better proof of wisdom than the use of it. We believe that an intelligent order presides over the universe and controls the destiny of worlds and their inhabitants; that the larger members of the solar system must last longer than the lesser ones, and, consequently, that the life of each planet is not equally dependent upon the Sun, and cannot, therefore, continue indefinitely, any more than the Sun itself. Moreover, direct observation confirms this general conception of the universe. The Earth, an extinct sun, has cooled more rapidly than the Sun. Jupiter, so immense, is still in its youth. The Moon, smaller than Mars, has reached the more advanced stages of astral life, perhaps even has reached its end. Mars, smaller than the Earth, is more advanced than the Earth and less so than the Moon. Our planet, in its turn, must die before Jupiter, and this, also, must take place before the Sun becomes extinct. + 

Consider, in fact, the relative sizes of the Earth and the other planets. The diameter of Jupiter is eleven times that of the Earth, and the diameter of the Sun about ten times that of Jupiter. The diameter of Saturn is nine times that of the Earth. It seems to us, therefore, natural to believe that Jupiter and Saturn will endure longer than our planet, Venus, Mars or Mercury, those pygmies of the system! + 

Events justified these deductions of science. Dangers lay in wait for us in the immensity of space; a thousand accidents might have befallen us, in the form of comets, extinct or flaming suns, nebulae, etc. But the planet did not perish by an accident. Old age awaited the Earth, as it waits for all other things, and it grew old faster than the Sun. It lost the conditions necessary for life more rapidly than the central luminary lost its heat and its light. + 

During the long periods of its vital splendor, when, leading the chorus of the worlds, it bore on its surface an intelligent race, victors over the blind forces of nature, a protecting atmosphere, beneath which went on all the play of life and happiness, guarded its flourishing empires. An essential element of nature, water, regulated terrestrial life; from the very beginning this element had entered into the composition of every substance, vegetable, animal and human. It formed the active principle of atmospheric circulation; it was the chief agent in the changes of climate and seasons; it was the sovereign of the terrestrial state. + 

From century to century the quantity of water in the sea, the rivers and the atmosphere diminished. A portion of the rain water was absorbed by the Earth, and did not return to the sea; for, instead of flowing into the sea over impermeable strata, and so forming either springs or subterranean and submarine watercourses, it had filtered deeper within the surface, insensibly filling every void, every fissure, and saturating the rocks to a great depth. So long as the internal heat of the globe was sufficient to prevent the indefinite descent of this water, and to convert it into vapor, a considerable quantity remained upon the surface; but the time came when the internal heat of the globe was entirely dispersed in space and offered no obstacle to infiltration. Then the surface water gradually diminished; it united with the rocks, in the form of hydrates, and thus disappeared from circulation. + 

Indeed, were the loss of the surface water of the globe to amount only to a few tenths of a millimeter yearly, in ten million years none would remain. + 

This vapor of water in the atmosphere had made warmth and life possible; with its disappearance came cold and death. If at present the aqueous vapor of the atmosphere should disappear, the heat of the sun would be incapable of maintaining animal and vegetable life; life which, moreover, could not exist, inasmuch as vegetables and animals are chiefly composed of water. + 

The invisible vapor of water, distributed through the atmosphere, exercises the greatest possible influence on temperature. In quantity this vapor seems almost negligible, since oxygen and nitrogen alone form ninety-nine and one-half percent of the air we breathe; and the remaining one-half of one percent contains, besides the vapor of water, carbonic acid, ammonia and other substances. There is scarcely more than a quarter of one percent of aqueous vapor. If we consider the constituent atoms of the atmosphere, the physicist tells us that for two hundred atoms of oxygen and nitrogen there is scarcely one of water-vapor; but this one atom has eighty times more absorptive energy than the two hundred others. + 

The radiant heat of the Sun, after traversing the atmosphere, warms the surface of the Earth. The heat waves reflected from the warmed earth are not lost in space. The aqueous vapor atoms, acting like a barrier, turn them back and preserve them for our benefit. + 

This is one of the most brilliant and the most fruitful discoveries of modern physics. The oxygen and nitrogen molecules of dry air do not oppose the radiation of heat; but, as we have just said, one molecule of water-vapor possesses eighty times the absorptive energy of the other two hundred molecules of dry air, and consequently such a molecule is sixteen thousand times more efficacious in so far as the conservation of heat is concerned. So that it is the vapor of water and not the air, properly speaking, which regulates the conditions of life upon the Earth. + 

If one should remove this vapor from the surrounding atmosphere, a loss of heat would go on at the surface similar to that which takes place in high altitudes, for the atmosphere would then be as powerless to retain heat as a vacuum is. A cold like that at the surface of the Moon would be the result. The soil would still receive heat directly from the sun, but even during the daytime this heat would not be retained, and after sunset the Earth would be exposed to the glacial cold of space, which appears to be about 273° below zero. Thus vegetable, animal and human life would be impossible, if it had not already become so, through the very disappearance of the water. + 

Certainly we may and must admit that water has not been so essential a condition of life on all the worlds of space as it has been upon our own. The resources of nature are not limited by human observation. There must be, there are, in the limitless realms of space, millions and millions of suns differing from ours, systems of worlds in which other substances, other chemical combinations, other physical and mechanical conditions, other environments, have produced beings absolutely unlike ourselves, living another life, possessed of other senses, differing in organization from ourselves far more than the fish or mollusk of the deep sea differs from the bird or the butterfly. But we are here studying the conditions of terrestrial life, and these conditions are determined by the constitution of the planet itself. + 

The gradual filtration of water into the interior of the Earth, keeping pace with the radiation of the Earth’s original heat into space, the slow formation of oxides and hydrates, in about eight million years reduced by three-fourths the quantity of water in circulation on the Earth’s surface. As a consequence of the disappearance of continental elevations, whose debris, obeying passively the laws of gravity, were slowly carried by the rain, the wind, and the streams to the sea, the Earth had become almost level and the seas more shallow; but as evaporation and the formation of aqueous vapor goes on only from the surface and does not depend upon the depth, the atmosphere was still rich in vapor. The conditions of life upon the planet were then similar to those we now observe on Mars; where we see that great oceans have disappeared or have become mere inland seas of slight depth, that the continents are vast plains, that evaporation is active, that a considerable quantity of aqueous vapor still exists, that rains are rare, that snows abound in the polar regions and are almost entirely melted during the summer of each year⁠—in short, a world still habitable by beings analogous to those that people the Earth. + 

This epoch marked the apogee of the human race. Thenceforward the conditions of life grew less favorable, and from century to century, from generation to generation, underwent marked change. Vegetable and animal species, the human race itself, everything in short, became transformed. But whereas, hitherto, these metamorphoses had enriched, embellished and perfected life, the day had come when decadence was to begin. + 

During more than a hundred thousand years it was insensible, for the parabolic curve of life did not suddenly fall away from its highest point. Humanity had reached a degree of civilization, of intellectual greatness, of physical and moral well-being, of scientific, artistic and industrial perfection, incomparably beyond anything of which we know. For several million years the central heat of the globe had been utilized in winter for general warming purposes by towns, villages, manufactories and every variety of industry. When this failing source of heat had finally become exhausted, the heat of the sun had been stored subject to the wants of the race, hydrogen had been extracted from seawater, the energy of waterfalls, and subsequently that of the tides, had been transformed into light and heat, and the entire planet had become the plaything of science, which disposed at will of all its elements. The human senses, perfected to a degree which we should now qualify as supernatural, and those newly acquired, mentioned above, become with the lapse of time more highly developed; humanity released more and more from the empire of matter; a new system of alimentation; the spirit governing the body and the gross appetites of former times forgotten; the psychic faculties in perpetual play, acting at a distance over the entire surface of the globe, communicating under certain conditions with even the inhabitants of Mars and Venus; apparatus which we cannot imagine replacing those optical instruments with which physical astronomy had begun its investigations; the whole world made new in its perceptions and interests; an enlightened social condition from which envy and jealousy, as well as robbery, suffering and murder had disappeared⁠—this, indeed, was a real humanity of flesh and bone like our own, but as far above it in intellectual supremacy as we are above the simians of the tertiary epoch. + 

Human intelligence had so completely mastered the forces of nature that it seemed as if so glorious an era never could come to an end. The decrease in the amount of water, however, commenced to alarm even the most optimistic. The great oceans had disappeared. The crust of the Earth, once so thin and mobile, had gradually increased in thickness, and, notwithstanding the internal pressure, the Earth had become almost completely solidified. Oscillations of the surface were no longer possible, for it had become entirely rigid. The seas which remained were confined to the tropics. The poles were frozen. The continents of olden times, where so many other foci of civilization had shone so brilliantly, were immense deserts. Step by step humanity had migrated towards the tropical zone, still watered by streams, lakes and seas. There were no more mountains, no more condensers of snow. + 

As the quantity of water and rainfall diminished, and, as the springs failed and the aqueous vapor of the atmosphere grew less, vegetation had entirely changed its aspect, increasing the volume of its leaves and the length of its roots, seeking in every way to absorb the humidity necessary for life. Species which had not been able to adjust themselves to the new conditions had vanished; the rest were transformed. Not a tree or a plant with which we are familiar was to be seen. There were no oaks, nor ashes, nor elms, nor willows, and the landscape bore no resemblance to that of today. Rudimentary species of cryptogams only survived. + 

Like changes had taken place in the animal kingdom. Animal forms had been greatly modified. The wild species had either disappeared or been domesticated. The scarcity of water had modified the food of herbivora as well as carnivora. The most recent species, evolved from those which preceded them, were smaller, with less fat and a larger skeleton. The number of plants had sensibly decreased. Less of the carbonic acid of the air was absorbed, and a proportionally greater quantity existed in the atmosphere. As for the human race, its metamorphosis was so absolute that it was with an astonishment bordering on incredulity that one saw in geological museums fossil specimens of men of the twentieth or one hundredth century, with great brutal teeth and coarse intestines; it was difficult to admit that organisms so gross could really be the ancestors of intellectual man. + 

Though millions of years had passed, the Sun still poured upon the Earth almost the same quantity of heat and light. At most, the loss had not exceeded one-tenth. The only difference was that the Sun appeared a little yellower and a little smaller. + 

The Moon still revolved about the Earth, but more slowly. Its distance from the Earth had increased and its apparent diameter had diminished. At the same time the period of the Earth’s rotation had lengthened. This slower rotatory motion of the Earth, increase in the distance of the Moon, and lengthening of the lunar month, were the results of the friction of the tides, whose action resembled that of a brake. If the Earth and the Moon last long enough, and there are still oceans and tides, calculation would enable us to predict that the time would come when the periodic time of the Earth’s rotation would finally equal the lunar month, so that there would be but five and one-quarter days in the year: the Earth would then always present the same side to the Moon. But this would require more than 150 million years. The period of which we are speaking, ten million years, is but a fifteenth of the above; and the time of the Earth’s rotation, instead of being seventy times, was only four and one-half times greater than it now is, or about 110 hours. + 

These long days exposed the Earth to the prolonged action of the Sun, but except in those regions where its rays were normal to the surface, that is to say in the equatorial zone between the two tropical circles, this exposure availed nothing; the obliquity of the ecliptic had not changed; the inclination of the axis of the Earth being the same, about two degrees, and the changes in the eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit had produced no sensible effect upon the seasons or the climate. + 

The human form, food, respiration, organic functions, physical and intellectual life, ideas, opinions, religion, science, language⁠—all had changed. Of present man almost nothing survived. + 

IV + 

The last habitable regions of the globe were two wide valleys near the equator, the basins of dried up seas; valleys of slight depth, for the general level was almost absolutely uniform. No mountain peaks, ravines or wild gorges, not a single wooded valley or precipice was to be seen; the world was one vast plain, from which rivers and seas had gradually disappeared. But as the action of meteorological agents, rainfall and streams, had diminished in intensity with the loss of water, the last hollows of the sea bottom had not been entirely filled up, and shallow valleys remained, vestiges of the former structure of the globe. In these a little ice and moisture were left, but the circulation of water in the atmosphere had ceased, and the rivers flowed in subterranean channels as in invisible veins. + 

As the atmosphere contained no aqueous vapor, the sky was always cloudless, and there was neither rain nor snow. The sun, less dazzling and less hot than formerly, shone with the yellowish splendor of a topaz. The color of the sky was sea-green rather than blue. The volume of the atmosphere had diminished considerably. Its oxygen and nitrogen had become in part fixed in metallic combinations, as oxides and nitrides, and its carbonic acid had slowly increased, as vegetation, deprived of water, became more and more rare and absorbed an ever decreasing amount of this gas. But the mass of the Earth, owing to the constant fall of meteorites, bolides and uranolites, had increased with time; so that the atmosphere, though considerably less in volume, had retained its density and exerted nearly the same pressure. + 

Strangely enough, the snow and ice had diminished as the Earth grew cold; the cause of this low temperature was the absence of water vapor from the atmosphere, which had decreased with the superficial area of the sea. As the water penetrated the interior of the Earth and the general level became more uniform, first the depth and then the area of seas had been reduced, the invisible envelope of aqueous vapor had lost its protecting power, and the day came when the return of the heat received from the sun was no longer prevented, it was radiated into space as rapidly as it was received, as if it fell upon a mirror incapable of absorbing its rays. + 

Such was the condition of the Earth. The last representatives of the human race had survived all these physical transformations solely by virtue of its genius of invention and power of adaptation. Its last efforts had been directed toward extracting nutritious substances from the air, from subterranean water, and from plants, and replacing the vanished vapor of the air by buildings and roofs of glass. + 

It was necessary at any cost to capture these solar rays and to prevent their radiation into space. It was easy to store up this heat in large quantities, for the Sun shone unobscured by any cloud and the day was long⁠—fifty-five hours. + 

For a long time the efforts of architects had been solely directed towards this imprisonment of the Sun’s rays and the prevention of their dispersion during the fifty-five hours of the night. They had succeeded in accomplishing this by an ingenious arrangement of glass roofs, superposed one upon the other, and by movable screens. All combustible material had long before been exhausted; and even the hydrogen extracted from water was difficult to obtain. + 

The mean temperature in the open air during the daytime was not very low, not falling below −10°. Notwithstanding the changes which the ages had wrought in vegetable life, no species of plants could exist, even in this equatorial zone. + 

As for the other latitudes, they had been totally uninhabitable for thousands of years, in spite of every effort made to live in them. In the latitudes of Paris, Nice, Rome, Naples, Algiers and Tunis, all protective atmospheric action had ceased, and the oblique rays of the sun had proved insufficient to warm the soil which was frozen to a great depth, like a veritable block of ice. The world’s population had gradually diminished from ten milliards to nine, to eight, and then to seven, one-half the surface of the globe being then habitable. As the habitable zone became more and more restricted to the equator, the population had still further diminished, as had also the mean length of human life, and the day came when only a few hundred millions remained, scattered in groups along the equator, and maintaining life only by the artifices of a laborious and scientific industry. + 

Later still, toward the end, only two groups of a few hundred human beings were left, occupying the last surviving centers of industry. From all the rest of the globe the human race had slowly but inexorably disappeared⁠—dried up, exhausted, degenerated, from century to century, through the lack of an assimilable atmosphere and sufficient food. Its last remnants seemed to have lapsed back into barbarism, vegetating like the Eskimo of the north. These two ancient centers of civilization, themselves yielding to decay, had survived only at the cost of a constant struggle between industrial genius and implacable nature. + 

Even here, between the tropics and the equator, the two remaining groups of human beings which still contrived to exist in face of a thousand hardships which yearly became more insupportable, did so only by subsisting, so to speak, on what their predecessors had left behind. These two ocean valleys, one of which was near the bottom of what is now the Pacific ocean, the other to the south of the present island of Ceylon, had formerly been the sites of two immense cities of glass⁠—iron and glass having been, for a long time, the materials chiefly employed in building construction. They resembled vast winter-gardens, without upper stories, with transparent ceilings of immense height. Here were to be found the last plants, except those cultivated in the subterranean galleries leading to rivers flowing under ground. + 

Elsewhere the surface of the Earth was a ruin, and even here only the last vestiges of a vanished greatness were to be seen. + 

In the first of these ancient cities of glass, the sole survivors were two old men, and the grandson of one of them, Omegar, who had seen his mother and sisters die, one after the other, of consumption, and who now wandered in despair through these vast solitudes. Of these old men, one had formerly been a philosopher and had consecrated his long life to the study of the history of perishing humanity; the other was a physician who had in vain sought to save from consumption the last inhabitants of the world. Their bodies seemed wasted by anaemia rather than by age. They were pale as specters, with long, white beards, and only their moral energy sustained them yet an instant against the decree of destiny. But they could not struggle longer against this destiny, and one day Omegar found them stretched lifeless, side by side. From the dying hands of one fell the last history ever written, the history of the final transformations of humanity, written half a century before. The second had died in his laboratory while endeavoring to keep in order the nourishment tubes, automatically regulated by machinery propelled by solar engines. + 

The last servants, long before developed by education from the simian race, had succumbed many years before, as had also the great majority of the animal species domesticated for the service of humanity. Horses, dogs, reindeers, and certain large birds used in aerial service, yet survived, but so entirely changed that they bore no resemblance to their progenitors. + 

It was evident that the race was irrevocably doomed. Science had disappeared with scientists, art with artists, and the survivors lived only upon the past. The heart knew no more hope, the spirit no ambition. The light was in the past; the future was an eternal night. All was over. The glories of days gone by had forever vanished. If, in preceding centuries, some traveller, wandering in these solitudes, thought he had rediscovered the sites of Paris, Rome, or the brilliant capitals which had succeeded them, he was the victim of his own imagination; for these sites had not existed for millions of years, having been swept away by the waters of the sea. Vague traditions had floated down through the ages, thanks to the printing-press and the recorders of the great events of history; but even these traditions were uncertain and often false. For, as to Paris, the annals of history contained only some references to a maritime Paris; of its existence as the capital of France for thousands of years, there was no trace nor memory. The names which to us seem immortal, Confucius, Plato, Muhammad, Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and Napoleon, had perished and were forgotten. Art had, indeed, preserved noble memories; but these memories did not extend as far back as the infancy of humanity, and reached only a few million years into the past. Omegar lingered in an ancient gallery of pictures, bequeathed by former centuries, and contemplated the great cities which had disappeared. Only one of these pictures related to what had once been Europe, and was a view of Paris, consisting of a promontory projecting into the sea, crowned by an astronomical temple and gay with helicopterons circling above the lofty towers of its terraces. Immense ships were plowing the sea. This classic Paris was the Paris of the one hundred and seventieth century of the Christian era, corresponding to the one hundred and fifty-seventh of the astronomical era⁠—the Paris which existed immediately prior to the final submergence of the land. Even its name had changed; for words change like persons and things. Nearby, other pictures portrayed the great but less ancient cities which had risen in America, Australia, Asia, and afterwards upon the continents which had emerged from the ocean. And so this museum of the past recalled in succession the passing pomps of humanity down to the end. + 

The end! The hour had struck on the timepiece of destiny. Omegar knew the life of the world henceforth was in the past, that no future existed for it, and that the present even was vanishing like the dream of a moment. The last heir of the human race felt the overwhelming sentiment of the vanity of things. Should he wait for some inconceivable miracle to save him from his fate? Should he bury his companions, and share their tomb with them? Should he endeavor to prolong for a few days, a few weeks, a few years even, a solitary, useless and despairing existence? All day long he wandered through the vast and silent galleries, and at night abandoned himself to the drowsiness which oppressed him. All about him was dark⁠—the darkness of the sepulchre. + 

A sweet dream, however, stirred his slumbering thought, and surrounded his soul with a halo of angelic brightness. Sleep brought him the illusion of life. He was no longer alone. A seductive image which he had seen more than once before, stood before him. Eyes caressing as the light of heaven, deep as the infinite, gazed upon him and attracted him. He was in a garden filled with the perfume of flowers. Birds sang in the nests amid the foliage. And in the distant landscape, framed in plants and flowers, were the vast ruins of dead cities. Then he saw a lake, on whose rippling surface two swans glided, bearing a cradle from which a newborn child stretched toward him its arms. + 

Never had such a ray of light illuminated his soul. So deep was his emotion that he suddenly awoke, opened his eyes, and found confronting him only the somber reality. Then a sadness more terrible even than any he had known filled his whole being. He could not find an instant of repose. He rose, went to his couch, and waited anxiously for the morning. He remembered his dream, but he did not believe in it. He felt, vaguely, that another human being existed somewhere; but his degenerate race had lost, in part, its psychic power, and perhaps, also, woman always exerts upon man an attraction more powerful than that which man exerts upon woman. When the day broke, when the last man saw the ruins of his ancient city standing out upon the sky of dawn, when he found himself alone with the two last dead, he realized more than ever his unavoidable destiny, and decided to terminate at once a life so hopelessly miserable. + 

Going into the laboratory, he sought a bottle whose contents were well known to him, uncorked it, and carried it to his lips, to empty it at a draught. But, at the very moment the vial touched his lips, he felt a hand upon his arm. + 

He turned suddenly. There was no one in the laboratory, and in the gallery he found only the two dead. + 

V + 

In the ruins of the other equatorial city, occupying a once submerged valley south of the island of Ceylon, was a young girl, whose mother and older sister had perished of consumption and cold, and who was now left alone, the last surviving member of the last family of the race. A few trees, of northern species, had been preserved under the spacious dome of glass, and beneath their scanty foliage, holding the cold hands of her mother who had died the night before, the young girl sat alone, doomed to death in the very flower of her age. The night was cold. In the sky above the full moon shone like a golden torch, but its yellow rays were as cold as the silver beams of the ancient Selene. In the vast room reigned the stillness and solitude of death, broken only by the young girl’s breathing, which seemed to animate the silence with the semblance of life. + 

She was not weeping. Her sixteen years contained more experience and knowledge than sixty years of the world’s prime. She knew that she was the sole survivor of this last group of human beings, and that every happiness, every joy and every hope had vanished forever. There was no present, no future; only solitude and silence, the physical and moral impossibility of life, and soon eternal sleep. She thought of the woman of bygone days, of those who had lived the real life of humanity, of lovers, wives and mothers, but to her red and tearless eyes appeared only images of death; while beyond the walls of glass stretched a barren desert, covered by the last ice and the last snow. Now her young heart beat violently in her breast, till her slender hands could no longer compress its tumult; and now life seemed arrested in her bosom, and every respiration suspended. If for a moment she fell asleep, in her dreams she played again with her laughing and carefree sister, while her mother sung in a pure and penetrating voice the beautiful inspirations of the last poets; and she seemed to see, once more, the last fêtes of a brilliant society, as if reflected from the surface of some distant mirror. Then, on awakening, these magic memories faded into the somber reality. Alone! Alone in the world, and tomorrow death, without having known life! To struggle against this unavoidable fate was useless; the decree of destiny was without appeal, and there was nothing to do but to submit, to await the inevitable end, since without food or air organic life was impossible⁠—or else to anticipate death and deliver oneself at once from a joyless existence and a certain doom. She passed into the bathroom, where the warm water was still flowing, although the appliances which art had designed to supply the wants of life were no longer in working order; for the last remaining servants (descendants of ancient simian species, modified, as the human race had been, by the changing conditions of life,) had also succumbed to the insufficiency of water. She plunged into the perfumed bath, turned the key which regulated the supply of electricity derived from subterranean watercourses still unfrozen, and for a moment seemed to forget the decree of destiny in the enjoyment of this refreshing rest. Had any indiscreet spectator beheld her as, standing upon the bearskin before the large mirror, she began to arrange the tresses of her long auburn hair, he would have detected a smile upon her lips, showing that, for an instant, she was oblivious of her dark future. Passing into another room, she approached the apparatus which furnished the food of that time, extracted from the water, air, and the plants and fruits automatically cultivated in the greenhouses. + 

It was still in working order, like a clock which has been wound up. For thousands of years the genius of man had been almost exclusively applied to the struggle with destiny. The last remaining water had been forced to circulate in subterranean canals, where also the solar heat had been stored. The last animals had been trained to serve these machines, and the nutritious properties of the last plants had been utilized to the utmost. Men had finally succeeded in living upon almost nothing, so far as quantity was concerned; every newly discovered form of food being completely assimilable. Cities had finally been built of glass, open to the Sun, to which was conveyed every substance necessary to the synthesis of the food which replaced the products of nature. But as time passed, it became more and more difficult to obtain the necessaries of life. The mine was at last exhausted. Matter had been conquered by intelligence; but the day had come when intelligence itself was overmatched, when every worker had died at his post and the Earth’s storehouse had been depleted. Unwilling to abandon this desperate struggle, man had put forth every effort. But he could not prevent the Earth’s absorption of water, and the last resources of a science which seemed greater even than nature itself had been exhausted. + 

Eva returned to the body of her mother, and once more took the cold hands in her own. The psychic faculties of the race in these its latter days had acquired, as we have said, transcendent powers, and she thought for a moment to summon her mother from the tomb. It seemed to her as if she must have one more approving glance, one more counsel. A single idea took possession of her, so fascinating her that she even lost the desire to die. She saw afar the soul which should respond to her own. Every man belonging to that company of which she was the last survivor had died before her birth. Woman had outlived the sex once called strong. In the pictures upon the walls of the great library, in books, engravings and statues, she saw represented the great men of the city, but she had never seen a living man; and still dreaming, strange and disquieting forms passed before her. She was transported into an unknown and mysterious world, into a new life, and love did not seem to be yet wholly banished from earth. During the reign of cold, all electrical communication between the two last cities left upon the Earth had been interrupted. Their inhabitants could speak no more with each other, see each other no more, nor feel each other’s presence. Yet she was as well acquainted with the ocean city as if she had seen it, and when she fixed her eyes upon the great terrestrial globe suspended from the ceiling of the library, and then, closing them, concentrated all her will and psychic power upon the object of her thoughts, she acted at a distance as effectively, though in a different way, as in former days men had done when communicating with each other by electricity. She called, and felt that another heard and understood. The preceding night she had transported herself to the ancient city in which Omegar lived, and had appeared to him for an instant in a dream. That very morning she had witnessed his despairing act and by a supreme effort of the will had arrested his arm. And now, stretched in her chair beside the dead body of her mother, heavy with sleep, her solitary soul wandered in dreams above the ocean city, seeking the companionship of the only mate left upon the Earth. And far away, in that ocean city, Omegar heard her call. Slowly, as in a dream, he ascended the platform from which the airships used to take their flight. Yielding to a mysterious influence, he obeyed the distant summons. Speeding toward the west, the electric airship passed above the frozen regions of the tropics, once the site of the Pacific ocean, Polynesia, Malaisia and the Sunda islands, and stopped at the landing of the crystal palace. The young girl, startled from her dream by the traveller, who fell from the air at her feet, fled in terror to the farther end of the immense hall, lifting the heavy curtain of skin which separated it from the library. When the young man reached her side, he stopped, knelt, and took her hand in his, saying simply: “You called me. I have come.” And then he added: “I have known you for a long time. I knew that you existed, I have often seen you; you are the constant thought of my heart, but I did not dare to come.” + 

She bade him rise, saying: “My friend, I know that we are alone in the world, and that we are about to die. A will stronger than my own compelled me to call you. It seemed as if it were the supreme desire of my mother, supreme even in death. See, she sleeps thus since yesterday. How long the night is!” + 

The young man, kneeling, had taken the hand of the dead, and they both stood there beside the funeral couch, as if in prayer. + 

He leaned gently toward the young girl, and their heads touched. He let fall the hand of the dead. + 

Eva shuddered. “No,” she said. + 

Then, suddenly, he sprang to his feet in terror; the dead woman had revived. She had withdrawn the hand which he had taken in his own, and had opened her eyes. She made a movement, looking at them. + 

“I wake from a strange dream,” she said, without seeming surprised at the presence of Omegar. “Behold, my children, my dream;” and she pointed to the planet Jupiter, shining with dazzling splendor in the sky. + 

And as they gazed upon the star, to their astonished vision, it appeared to approach them, to grow larger, to take the place of the frozen scene about them. + 

Its immense seas were covered with ships. Aerial fleets cleaved the air. The shores of its seas and the mouths of its great rivers were the scenes of a prodigious activity. Brilliant cities appeared, peopled by moving multitudes. Neither the details of their habitations nor the forms of these new beings could be distinguished, but one divined that here was a humanity quite different from ours, living in the bosom of another nature, having other senses at its disposal; and one felt also that this vast world was incomparably superior to the Earth. + 

“Behold, where we shall be tomorrow!” said the dying woman. “We shall find there all the human race, perfected and transformed. Jupiter has received the inheritance of the Earth. Our world has accomplished its mission, and life is over here below. Farewell!” + 

She stretched out her arms to them; they bent over her pale face and pressed a long kiss upon her forehead. But they perceived that this forehead was cold as marble, in spite of this strange awakening. + 

The dead woman had closed her eyes, to open them no more. + 

VI + 

It is sweet to live. Love atones for every loss; in its joys all else is forgotten. Ineffable music of the heart, thy divine melody fills the soul with an ecstasy of infinite happiness! What illustrious historians have celebrated the heroes of the world’s progress, the glories of war, the conquests of mind and of spirit! Yet after so many centuries of labor and struggle, there remained only two palpitating hearts, the kisses of two lovers. All had perished except love; and love, the supreme sentiment, endured, shining like an inextinguishable beacon over the immense ocean of the vanished ages. + 

Death! They did not dream of it. Did they not suffice for each other? What if the cold froze their very marrow? Did they not possess in their hearts a warmth which defied the cold of nature? Did not the sun still shine gloriously, and was not the final doom of the world yet far distant? Omegar bent every energy to the maintenance of the marvellous system which had been devised for the automatic extraction by chemical processes of the nutritive principles of the air, water and plants, and in this he seemed to be successful. So in other days, after the fall of the Roman empire, the barbarians had been seen to utilize during centuries the aqueducts, baths and thermal springs, all the creations of the civilization of the Caesars, and to draw from a vanished industry the sources of their own strength. + 

But one day, wonderful as it was, this system gave out. The subterranean waters themselves ceased to flow. The soil was frozen to a great depth. The rays of the sun still warmed the air within the glass-covered dwellings, but no plant could live longer; the supply of water was exhausted. + 

The combined efforts of science and industry were impotent to give to the atmosphere the nutritive qualities possessed by those of other worlds, and the human organism constantly clamored for the regenerating principles which, as we have seen, had been derived from the air, water and plants. These sources were now exhausted. + 

This last human pair struggled against these insurmountable obstacles, and recognized the uselessness of farther contest, yet they were not resigned to death. Before knowing each other they had awaited it fearlessly. Now each wished to defend the other, the beloved one, against pitiless destiny. The very idea of seeing Omegar lying inanimate beside her, filled Eva with such anguish that she could not bear the thought. And he, too, vainly longed to carry away his well beloved from a world doomed to decay, to fly with her to that brilliant Jupiter which awaited them, and not to abandon to the Earth the body he adored. + 

He thought that, perhaps, there still existed, somewhere upon the Earth, a spot which had retained a little of that life-giving water without which existence was impossible; and, although already they were both almost without strength, he formed the supreme resolution of setting out to seek for it. The electric aeronef was still in working order. Forsaking the city which was now only a tomb, the two last survivors of a vanished humanity abandoned these inhospitable regions and set out to seek some unknown oasis. + 

The ancient kingdoms of the world passed under their feet. They saw the remains of great cities, made illustrious by the splendors of civilization, lying in ruins along the equator. The silence of death covered them all. Omegar recognized the ancient city which he had recently left, but he knew that there, also the supreme source of life was lacking, and they did not stop. They traversed thus, in their solitary airship, the regions which had witnessed the last stages of the life of humanity; but death, and silence, and the frozen desert was everywhere. No more fields, no more vegetation; the watercourses were visible as on a map, and it was evident that along their banks life had been prolonged; but they were now dried up forever. And when, at times, some motionless lake was distinguished in the lower level, it was like a lake of stone; for even at the equator the sun was powerless to melt the eternal ice. A kind of bear, with long fur, was still to be seen wandering over the frozen earth, seeking in the crevices of the rocks its scanty vegetable food. From time to time, also, they descried a kind of penguin and sea-cows walking upon the ice, and large, gray polar birds in awkward flight, or alighting mournfully. + 

Nowhere was the sought-for oasis found. The Earth was indeed dead. + 

Night came. Not a cloud obscured the sky. A warmer current from the south had carried them over what was formerly Africa, now a frozen waste. The mechanism of the aeronef had ceased to work. Exhausted by cold rather than by hunger, they threw themselves upon the bearskins in the bottom of the car. + 

Perceiving a ruin, they alighted. It was an immense quadrangular base, revealing traces of an enormous stone stairway. It was still possible to recognize one of the ancient Egyptian pyramids which, in the middle of the desert, survived the civilization which it represented. With all Egypt, Nubia and Abyssinia, it had sunk below the level of the sea, and had afterwards emerged into the light and been restored in the heart of a new capital by a new civilization, more brilliant than that of Thebes and of Memphis, and finally had been again abandoned to the desert. It was the only remaining monument of the earlier life of humanity, and owed its stability to its geometric form. + 

“Let us rest here,” said Eva, “since we are doomed to die. Who, indeed, has escaped death? Let me die in peace in your arms.” + 

They sought a corner of the ruin and sat down beside each other, face to face with the silent desert. The young girl cowered upon the ground, pressing her husband in her arms, still striving with all her might against the penetrating cold. He drew her to his heart, and warmed her with his kisses. + 

“I love you, and I am dying,” she said. “But, no, we will not die. See that star, which calls us!” + 

At the same moment they heard behind them a slight noise, issuing from the ancient tomb of Cheops, a noise like that the wind makes in the leaves. Shuddering, they turned, together, in the direction whence the sound came. A white shadow, which seemed to be self-luminous, for the night was already dark and there was no moon, glided rather than walked toward them, and stopped before their astonished eyes. + 

“Fear nothing,” it said. “I come to seek you. No, you shall not die. No one has ever died. Time flows into eternity; eternity remains. + 

“I was Cheops, King of Egypt, and I reigned over this country in the early days of the world. As a slave, I have since expiated my crimes in many existences, and when at length my soul deserved immortality I lived upon Neptune, Ganymede, Rhea, Titan, Saturn, Mars, and other worlds as yet unknown to you. Jupiter is now my home. In the days of humanity’s greatness, Jupiter was not habitable for intelligent beings. It was passing through the necessary stages of preparation. Now this immense world is the heir to all human achievement. Worlds succeed each other in time as in space. All is eternal, and merges into the divine. Confide in me, and follow me.” + 

And as the old Pharaoh was still speaking, they felt a delicious fluid penetrate their souls, as sometimes the ear is filled with an exquisite melody. A sense of calm and transcendent happiness flowed in their veins. Never, in any dream, in any ecstasy, had they ever experienced such joy. + 

Eva pressed Omegar in her arms. “I love you,” she repeated. Her voice was only a breath. He touched his lips to her already cold mouth, and heard them murmur: “How I could have loved!” + 

Jupiter was shining majestically above them, and in the glorious light of his rays their sight grew dim and their eyes gently closed. + 

The spectre rose into space and vanished. And one to whom it is given to see, not with the bodily eyes, which perceive only material vibrations, but with the eyes of the soul, which perceive psychical vibrations, might have seen two small flames shining side by side, united by a common attraction, and rising, together with the phantom, into the heavens. + 