Was Reichenbach Right?

EDITOR OF THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY : —

DEAR SIR, — A manuscript, of which the following is an exact copy, was found among my late husband’s papers a few weeks since. I have myself transcribed it, since some portions might have been quite illegible to any one else. He died on the night of November 14, 1867, after a painful illness of eleven months, beginning on the morning of December 20, 1866, when we found him in a swoon upon the floor of his laboratory, with the gem, or magnet, of which he speaks, clenched fast in his hand.

I know not whether his narrative is of any value to science : but the fact that the bare possibility of its being so induced him to give up to it all his brief intervals of ease from wearing pain, constrains me to make :t public. The magnet is still in my possession ; and, should any one wish to examine it, you are at liberty to give my address. By my husband’s express desire no one except myself has been allowed to touch it : and, I feel bound to add, it has revealed to me —nothing.

The tale is certainly a strange one; yet my husband was never a credulous person; indeed I always thought him rather sceptical than otherwise, and I am positively sure, from my own knowledge, corroborated by the testimony of his physicians, that he was not, at the time of his death, or during his illness, insane or even delirious.

Very respectfully yours, SARAH L——.

I HAVE a discovery to announce, or f perhaps I should rather say, a revelation to make, of a nature so startling and strange that I feel, in common modesty. almost constrained to bespeak for it the incredulity of a discriminatingpublic.

Indeed, were not my secret too tremendous for a mind of ordinary calibre to keep without danger to itself, I should be sorely tempted not to reveal it at all. But, as it is, I have been forced, in sheer self-defence, to choose the lesser horn of a terrible dilemma, and to brave the risk of being called a lunatic, rather than that of becoming one. For, reader, I am sane enough as yet. I see, as clearly as the most sagacious man among you, the utter incredibility of the tale I have to tell. I feel, as keenly as the most sensitive, its seeming absurdity. I can call to my lips at this moment the very smile, half-pitying, half-derisive, wholly sceptical, with which I should listen were you the narrator ; yet let me beseech you to be wiser and to suspend your judgment, or if you must call me a lunatic, if you will write me down an ass, at least hear me to the end. With so many secrets clustering, loosely hidden, all above and around us, and so many eyes peering eagerly into the dark profound, what wonder if some eyes, more piercing, or more fortunate than the rest, should now and then catch glimpses of its marvels.

I am, as you may have already guessed, an amateur naturalist, — a simple student, not in any sense a master, of nature’s mysterious lore, feeling always the keenest and most insatiable curiosity about all things in heaven and earth, yet possessing few books, compared with my wants at least, and fewer instruments of science, and therefore obliged to rely, in my researches, upon a vigilant system of keeping my eyes open.

In pursuance of this system I set myself, in common, I suppose, with many others, to look for meteors upon the night of 1213th of November, 1866, with what success most will feelingly remember. Amateur naturalists, however, soon get accustomed to failures and disappointments ; and so, though I found myself the butt of the breakfast-table upon the morning of the 13th, I yet persevered, somewhat drowsily indeed, and with a slightly diminished expectation, though with undiminished curiosity and interest, in watching the stars out again upon the evening of that day.

My post of observation was a good one,— a small, isolated structure which I had built, for the sake of quietness and safety, upon an eminence in my little park ; for the reader must know that I am blest—and bothered — with a wife, a mother, and a maiden sister, each of whom outvies the others in the possession and exercitation of sensitive nerves, delicate olfactories, and a horror of dust, and neither of whom, though regarding a Leyden jar as an infernal machine, and sulphuretted hydrogen as an intolerable stench, would yet feel the slightest hesitation about scrubbing out a powder-magazine, or “ putting to rights” a package of nitro-glycerine. So in pity to the nerves and the olfactories, and in wholesome dread of the dusting, I had built this little hermitage,— “office,” my good country neighbors called it, — with a room at the base for my small stock of chemicals and apparatus, and an observatory at the top for my small telescope, and tabooed even the door-key from the touch of feminine fingers. It was christened, with a touch of malice, the “ Blue Chamber ” ; but Bluebeard took good care that Fatima should never get in.

It is solemn work always, this watching the stars alone at midnight. I could never do it upon the commonest occasion without a subduing sense of awe and reverence akin to devotion ; but now (whether it were a prescience or no I cannot tell) there came over me, at the very outset, a strange thrilling acceleration and accumulation of this feeling. The radiant stars blazed momently with a sublimer radiance, the solemn depths of space spread deeper and more solemn, the faint far nebulæ dawned more awfully mysterious, till I was fain to cry out, with the dreamer of the German poet, “Hide me! O, hide me, from the persecution of the Infinite! ”

As the night wore on, and constellation after constellation rose grandly above the bare tree-tops, I was not, perhaps, the only watcher who turned with swimming brain and bounding pulse and eager gaze towards the charmed regionof Gamma Leonis ; but I was, probably, the only one, on this side of the ocean, who was not doomed to turn away again, when the first streaks of dawn put out the stars, in bitter disappointment. For, from those immeasurable depths, into which my eyes were seeking with such aching intensity of gaze to penetrate, there came to me, with the faint gray of that unwelcome dawn, a swift and sudden messenger.

A distant point of light, a nearer flash, a hiss, a roar, a stunning concussion, and there lay, half-buried in the earth beneath my window, a strange gray mass, glowing at its surface with the intense heat evolved by the sudden cessation of its motion, chilled at its core with the insufferable cold of the drear abyss in which for ages it had moved, and holding, locked up in its weird bosom, the secret which the whole scientific world was at that moment breathlessly seeking to penetrate.

What was it? Whence had it come, and how ? If the dumb matter could but speak, what problems might it not solve, what mysteries reveal ! And matter could speak, somehow, to those who had ears to hear. It spoke to Galileo, and assured him that the earth did move ; to Copernicus, and taught him the true theory of the solar system ; to Newton, and revealed to him gravitation. Perhaps it was speaking now, telling with dumb, awful tongue the story of the birth or death of worlds. O for the mysterious sixth sense of genius, with which to hear and understand !

It was several hours before the stone — a small aerolite of from twenty-five to thirty pounds’ weight — could be with safety lifted from its bed ; and meanwhile I was consumed with impatience to examine it, — impatience for which, even in this view of the subject, I could scarcely account. I had often seen and examined meteorolites before, and knew, or supposed I knew, just what I should find; but there was a strange, almost uncanny influence about this one, which seemed to draw and hold me like a magnet.

An eager, passionate curiosity, at once stimulated and held in check by an awe which amounted almost to terror, possessed me. To seize upon the stone, to break it up and subject every minutest atom to the most rigid scrutiny and analysis, to wring from it, as it were, by every ingenious and persevering torture which chemistry could invent its mighty secret, was the impulse of one moment ; to shrink from it, as from some unknown, unutterable horror, was the impulse of the next.

If it were possible for a medical student, not yet completely inhumanized, to dissect a living human body, — to pursue the fleeing life through shrinking nerve and bleeding artery, through panting lungs and throbbing heart and quivering brain, to its last, inmost citadel, resolved with pitiless unflinching hand to strip off every covering till he could cry, in remorseful triumph, “Eureka ! here is the spirit!” — I suppose he might set about his task with much the same mingling of curiosity, horror, and compunction with which I shut myself up in my laboratory and began my investigation.

For, singular and superstitious as it may appear, I had come by this time, almost unawares, to look upon the stone as a living, even in some sense a sentient being, and to refer the weird influence which seemed to pervade it rather to a person than to a thing. And, strangely enough, as I pursued my analysis, though I found only the substances combined in the proportions common to aerolites, this feeling deepened and strengthened. Day after day I set about my task with an intenser awe and a keener curiosity. Bit by bit I examined the stone ; had it been possible I would have taken it atom by atom, so sure was I that this dread something lurked there, so fearful lest, for all my pains, it should elude my vigilance.

And, stranger still, it was no longer the establishment or refutation of any theories about the meteors which engaged my attention ; it was no longer even the meteors themselves which interested me. They might be generated in the earth’s atmosphere, or projected from the volcanoes of the moon ; they might be the residuum of creation, swept aside and left to float at random, or the stokers of the universe, appointed to keep up the sidereal heats by perpetual concussions, — the wrecks of elder worlds, or the primordial utricles of worlds unborn, — I cared not which. A more momentous subject seemed to engage my attention, a nearer, more thrilling, I could almost have thought more human, revelation, to await me.

Slowly, with infinite care and pains, I approached the completion of my task, till but a single fragment of the meteorolite remained for examination. This, with a certain unreasoning impulse, akin perhaps to that which prompts a child to put aside its choicest sweetmeats till the last, I had purposely reserved.

It was a small, irregular piece broken off from one side of the mass, of an ashy-gray color, sprinkled all over with shining metallic points, and covered on one side with the dingy black enamel which had formed the coating of the whole. Piercing this enamel and running diagonally nearly through the fragment was a small round orifice, perhaps half an inch in diameter, lined apparently with a vitreous coating, but having its edge clear and sharp as if cut with a drill. This orifice would of itself have attracted my attention, and the added fact that some particles of iron from its vicinity proved very strongly magnetic, will sufficiently account for my feeling that here, if at all, would be found the key I sought.

Dreading alike success and disappointment, I spent several hours in irresolution, and finally decided, about five o’clock upon a stormy December afternoon, to make a night of it, and settle the question once for all. Out of regard for the weak nerves of my feminines, I seldom visited my laboratory after dark, and indeed had never done so since the fall of the aerolite. Possibly, therefore, this may not have been the first occasion of its exhibiting the singular property I am about to describe, though the fact stated may account for my never having noticed the exhibition before.

If my reader has studied Reichenbach, and believes in him, he will not, perhaps, be surprised. I had got a smattering of Reichenbach, as of most things, but felt, and rather prided myself upon feeling, a profound contempt for mesmerism and all the other “pseudo-sciences.” Judge, therefore, of my astonishment, upon returning to the laboratory about eight o’clock in the evening, to find it illuminated by a pale, lambent, auroral light, which seemed to find its source and centre in the fragment of aerolite upon the table.

A vague sentiment of apprehension and terror seized me. For weeks I had been expecting something out of the common way, — watching and waiting for some unusual phenomenon with a craving which would not be denied; yet the Witch of Endor herself could scarcely have been more amazed when Samuel responded to her incantations than was I when the wonder came.

Man of science, quintessence of the nineteenth century, and therefore superior to all forms of superstition though I felt myself to be, it is nevertheless a fact that the old, unreasoning dread and horror of the supernatural — in the very form too which Homer, and Job before him, so graphically described— came over me : “the hair of my flesh stood upright,” and my knees shook under me.

But, after a moment’s struggle, the “spirit of the age” triumphed, the amateur naturalist asserted himself and began to ask questions. Was Reichenbach right after all ? Was man-really in sympathy with all the great secret forces of nature ? And was I one of the favored “sensitive” few to whom the demonstration of this sympathy was permitted ? It was worth proving at any rate. I closed the door, locked it, according to my wont; and, with a resolute effort, walked deliberately up to the table.

A delicate lambent flame, like far-off summer lightning, played above the surface of the stone, and — it proceeded from the orifice. Curiosity mastered fear. I took up my mallet, and with one sharp blow shivered the fragment into a hundred pieces. A vivid coruscation blinded me ; a swift, sudden thrill, like an electric shock, ran through every nerve ; and again that shuddering horror crept over me like a paralysis.

I know not how long it may have been before I recovered myself sufficiently to investigate the startling phenomenon. When I did, I saw lying upon the granite slab before me, amid the gray bits of crumbling stone, what seemed a jewel of marvellous clearness and brilliancy, sparkling and gleaming with opalescent light, and illuminating the whole room with a strange, unearthly radiance.

A nearer view showed that the gem was cut or moulded into the likeness of a human head ; and also that the metallic dust around was gathering itself into magnetic figures. The jewel was, then, as I had suspected when first I saw the light, a magnet, moulded, upon Knight’s principle, from some unknown crystalline substance of wonderful power into this whimsical shape. By whom, and where ?

The face lay upturned towards me,— a glorious face, instinct with beauty and intellect, ineffable, yet wearing a weird, awful, lost expression, — the face of an archangel ruined. Was it a likeness of the maker ? Who, what, where was he ?

A mad, tumultuous curiosity overcame the last remnant of awe. I snatched up the magnet to look closer: again that strange, electric thrill, a thousand times intensified; then a swift, intolerable pang, followed as quickly by a vague, numb nothingness, as if the living I were being somehow blotted out, — a dizzy, dreadful sense of whirling mentally backward through incomputable ages, of drawing æons of æons nearer to the dim, awful dawn of time, of rising through immeasurable heights, of sinking again in depths unfathomable ; and I — or rather not I, but some strange entity which enveloped and pervaded and usurped me— awoke in another world.

Yes, reader, another world. “ Whether in the body or out of the body,” as the rapt apostle phrases it, I know not; but certainly in the spirit, and with other bodily organs, if not my own ; as clearly, as vividly, as wesentlich, as — I cannot say as at the present time, for since this strange experience I have seemed to be living in a world of shadows, — but as ever in my earthly days I saw and felt and heard the things and people of earth, I now saw and felt and heard the things and people of another world.

I said “ awoke ” ; yet there was really no break in the conscious continuity of my existence, only a swift darkening and fading out of the things visible, as happens to one in a sudden vertigo, followed by as swift a shining forth of the things invisible, — things so new and yet so old, so strange, yet so familiar, that in speaking of them, I feel straitened for language in which to express myself.

If I could but talk to you as those strange beings talked to each other! But vagueness in all things is, I believe, a condition of our earthly existence. Let me, then, —clearly if I can, vaguely if I must,— convey to you some of the impressions which this world, these people, this phase of existence, made upon my mind.

First, and most puzzling perhaps of all, was an odd sense of double consciousness, a conception of myself as a sort of inner self, dead, for the most part, to all feeling save the intense curiosity which had been its last earthly emotion, watching with cool, keen, passionless scrutiny the workings of another nature, itself yet not itself, endowed with higher powers and more varied capacities, instinct with intenser life, thrilling with more potent energy, scheming, working, hoping, despairing, enjoying, and suffering, after a fashion which, by comparison, dwarfed my grandest earthly experiences into the merest child’s play.

This strange duality at first absorbed me completely. My connection with this other nature was so perfect that I could not at once determine whether I were the possessed or the possessor, yet so subtile as to defy all my attempts at understanding it. All sensation, all perception of outward things, came to me, as it were, sifted through an outer consciousness ; yet I still felt my own personal identity most clearly and sharply defined, was conscious of thinking my own thoughts, drawing my own conclusions, and even in a certain stoical, passionless way of living my own life, and comparing it with its past.

The barest possibility of such an awful nearness to another spirit would once have filled me with horror, while the reality now seemed only to inspire me with keener curiosity. It was as if the emotional part of my nature were blotted out, and the intellectual alone remained ; as if the man were dead, and the amateur naturalist alone survived ; or rather, as I presently came to think, as if the other nature were too near akin to inspire awe.

And this latter feeling linked itself strangely with a vague, tormenting suggestion that I held within myself the key to all this mystery ; and that by one vigorous effort of will, or possibly of memory, I might clear it up forever.

But the vigorous tide of life into which I was plunged, surging on so resistlessly, the strange, new world around, pressing in by such broad and easy avenues, and appealing so urgently to my ruling passion, left little time for merely introspective speculation.

With regard to these, as indeed, to everything within the reach of human ken, I soon found I had the power of drawing upon the knowledge and experience, vast beyond all previous conceptions of the strange Mitgeist, whom, lacking a better name, I shall call, in Socratic style, my demon.

Through this channel mysteries were opened to my cognizance — physical, psychical, spiritual — the mere remembrance of which at this time causes my flesh to creep, and my very inmost soul to shrink and tremble. Beyond the threshold of these dread arcana, I do not propose to penetrate ; pausing there, I shall still, I feel, tax your credulity and my own overtasked strength almost beyond endurance. Thus much I have said by way of explaining the source of a knowledge which else could have been attained, by human faculties, only with the most patient, long-continued, and laborious research.

Yet when I came to exercise the new faculties so suddenly conferred, and to separate and examine the sensations they conveyed, I found them, as I have hinted above, not altogether new, but rather the expansion of powers and the refinement of sensations already familiar.

I was conscious, for instance, of breathing an atmosphere composed of pure oxygen in some unknown allotropic form; and the certainty that it was oxygen, together with the knowledge of its chemical differentiation from either the common form or ozone, was conveyed to me in some way through the sense of smell, though not as an odor.

Again I could have pronounced with absolute certainty upon the truth of the undulatory theory of light, from an impression produced upon the optic nerve, though this perception was something quite distinct from an act of vision. And this same perception, by the by, revealed itself, to my great delight, as a link whereby to grasp the whole chain of subtile connection between light, heat, electricity, motion, gravitation, &c., and to enable me to perceive, with the clearness of positive experience, that these are, in reality, what our men of science are even now attempting to demonstrate, one force, (force is the word, gentlemen, unless you dare substitute WILL,) exhibiting itself in so many differing, yet perfectly interchangeable modes.

I needed no proof at the time of a fact as patent to my senses as the existence of matter; and, even now, I think, did time and strength permit, I could supply Messrs. Tyndall and Faraday ¹ with a hint or two from my experience ; but that must wait.

I could multiply instances, through all the round of sensational experience, to show you how this life, which seemed, and was too, so much broader, fuller, and more perfect than our own, —fresh as infancy, ardent as youth, vigorous as manhood, experienced as age, — was yet as familiar to my human cognizance as manhood or youth ; how this strange new world, so facile and friendly, laying open its secrets at a touch, yielding up its treasures at a wish, seemed, after all, only an older, a vaster and better educated earth.

Metaphysicians, I believe, are accustomed to consider a man’s inability to conceive of a mode of intelligent existence essentially and totally unlike his own as an infirmity, — a proof that he is not endowed with the creative faculty. That man lacks, and will always lack, this faculty I should be the last to deny ; but, in the light of my own strange experience, I have come to regard this supposed proof of it as rather the instinctive acknowledgment of a great truth, the intuitive recognition of the fact that all created intelligences are in reality formed, corporeally and spiritually, after one perfect model, — a model dimly hinted at in all mythologies, and more perfectly revealed to Moses in his sublime vision of our earthly Genesis. “ Let US make man in OUR image, after OUR likeness ” ; and if man, the inhabitant of a world comparatively obscure and insignificant, how much rather the dwellers in nobler and vaster orbs.

Yet, evident as this appears to me in theory, I found, it must be confessed, something altogether startling and strange in its realization ; and I remember recalling, with a queer feeling of patronizing corroboration, a passage I had met with somewhere in my reading to this effect: “ Perhaps, if transported to another planet, we should feel more amazement at meeting there with beings like ourselves than in encountering the strangest and most grotesque forms that could be conceived of.”

And, certainly, this was my own experience. The familiarity was at first far more astonishing, as well as more puzzling, than the strangeness. Gorgons and chimeras would scarcely have surprised and confounded me so much as these exaggerated likenesses of my kind ; the “ desolate tracts of space,” upon which Dr. Whewell so admiringly expatiates, would scarcely have seemed so eerie as the wonted, earth-like aspect of the world around.

And yet there were not wanting modifications, sufficiently startling, of what we are accustomed to consider the laws and conditions of nature. A foreign country is queer enough ; fancy a foreign planet, — a world from which the sun shrinks away a hundred millions of miles farther into space, where Jupiter swells to the size of our full moon, and the rings of Saturn parade their majestic splendor for the unassisted eye ; a world where gold is as hard as steel, and mercury as dense as gold ; where water supersedes glass, and is, in its turn, superseded by peroxyd of hydrogen (HO.2), no longer nauseous and abominable, but to the adapted taste and need of its consumers wholesome and refreshing ; a world where the most numerous class of mammals is a sort of cetaceous pachyderm ; where the prevailing type of fish life is, to speak Erinically, crustacean, and by far the larger proportion of vegetables diatomaceous.

Fancy, O shade of Cuvier, if thou hast not already beheld it, an animal with the fur and blubber of a seal, the frame and strength of an elephant, and the intelligence and docility of a horseFancy, O dear and revered Agassiz, another and a vaster Amazon, swarming with innumerable and enormous species of Entomostraca, — Cyclops rivalling in size and strength the “ obscene giant ” from whom they take their name, and Daphnia as large as snapping turtles ! Fancy, O patient Carpenter, forests of Licmophoræ waving their quaintly graceful fans forever to and fro, and fleets of Naviculæ which might serve for literal ferry-boats.²

Such, reader, was this world in which I found myself, — a world quaint and strange in all these minor details, yet familiar in the grand general features of plant and animal, of atmosphere and continent and ocean; beautiful, far beyond my feeble power of description, with the exquisite, consummate beauty of order and fitness and proportion; yet seeming, withal, to my unwonted sense a little tame,—lacking — educated out of, as it were — a certain savage freedom and piquancy of expression which our little planet still possesses. For nature, with us, is still the teacher, the tyrant, the mistress, the sphinx — gracious and beneficent in the main, turning on us the bewildering sweetness of her woman’s face, yet crushing back presumption with an iron hand, setting up relentlessly in the path of the too aspiring her stern “ thus far and no farther,” revealing ever and anon her brute’s claws, and avenging her outraged majesty with strange vindictiveness ; while nature, with them, was the servant, the slave, the beast of burden,— obedient, submissive, obsequious, curbed and harnessed and driven about at will, yet, after all, wearing her fetters with a certain sinuous, mocking grace — as who should say, “They bind me only while I will be bound ” —which made even her tameness terrible.

But, if the world was wonderful, what shall I say of its inhabitants ? How shall I describe to you a race, human, if one may say so, and mortal too, as we ourselves, yet possessing an organization exquisite and enduring far beyond our happiest experience, with every faculty trained to what seemed its highest perfection, and every sense educated to its subtlest refinement; a race to whom our most strenuous exertions would have been as the mere involuntary instincts and intuitions of their transcendent powers, our highest attainments the mere alphabet of their magnificent lore, our noblest aspirations the mere forgotten taken-forgranted faits accomplis of their grand achievements ?

And yet I pitied them !

Magnificent creatures, though they were, glorious alike in physique and in intellect, dazzling and abashing my feebleness at every turn, with the variety and perfection of their powers and attainments, amazing me with their almost absolute mastery of nature, bewildering me with their apparent annihilation of the bounds of time and space, — I was yet touched with an awful, inexpressible feeling of compassion to observe in them, looming through the brightness like the first faint shadow of a coming eclipse, the same subtle, inexplicable, thrilling prophecy of ruin and desolation which I had noticed in the features of the magnet and felt in the body and the spirit of my demon.

And this sad prophecy I found again reiterated in the name which, with some horrible foreboding instinct, they had given, or been made to give, to their planet ; a name conveying, I know not what eerie, unutterable idea of destruction and perdition, best rendered, perhaps, though untranslatable, by the Greek word ’αποϵία; a name than which none could have been chosen more seemingly inappropriate, since nothing could have been imagined more apparently fixed and stable than the state of the world to which it was applied.

With us it has passed into a proverb, that “ extremes meet.” I know not how far the rules of earth may apply in matters super-mundane ; but if it is possible for order to trench upon the confines of disorder anywhere, I should say it may have done so here, for certainly the one extreme had been produced to its farthest limit. We call mathematics, mechanics, &c., exact sciences. The Apoleians had reduced all science to exactness ; or, at least, so nearly so that they were enabled in nearly all matters, purely intellectual or scientific, to make use of a language of symbols as universal and as accurate as that of algebra or the calculus ; with what result in the way of time and brain saving can be better imagined than described. If Comte and Cousin could express themselves as clearly as Newton and Leibnitz, who knows but they might agree as well ? And what an enormous economy of “gray matter ” would accrue to their bewildered followers.

Time and strength would alike fail me in the attempt to describe to you a tithe of the triumphs over difficulties — social, scientific, intellectual, and practical— which these wonderful beings had achieved. We call ourselves lords of creation, whilst we are still the playthings of the elements and the victims of the very reptiles which crawl at our feet. We boast of chaining the lightning and harnessing the vapors, because with painful effort and clumsy contrivance we can coax the one to carry a message and the other to drive a wheel. They had asserted the rights we only claim, and made themselves in very deed and truth the lords of creation, by conquering the brutes and subduing the elements. They had reduced the whole animal kingdom, including even their own grosser nature, to a state of the most abject submission ; established a system of inter-zonial ventilation, by which the climates of their planet were equalized, and the showers and dew dispensed almost at pleasure ; utilized upon a grand scale the motion of the winds and tides ; taught the magnetic currents to bear their messages without the hindering help of batteries and wires ; and compelled the great physical forces of electricity, gravitation, &c., to do for them the drudgery we clumsily and painfully exact from men and brutes.

Released thus from the manual, and even to a great extent from the supervisional, labor which still absorbs us so completely, they were left free to attack the great social, political, and scientific problems, which with us are still in abeyance ; to strike the even balance of supply and demand ; to devise and establish a system of self-government which admitted no chance of degenerating into either anarchy or absolutism ; to demonstrate how the greatest good to the greatest number is still perfectly consistent with the pursuit of individual happiness and the freedom of individual will ; to acquaint themselves with the laws of their own physical, psychical, and spiritual being: to study the past history and present condition of their own planet; and even to make some acquaintance with their neighbors.

Newton immortalized himself by discovering gravitation ; indeed, I believe he gets credit with half the world for inventing it. Somebody is losing a grand chance of doing the like with its opposite ; for the scientific world in general is already beginning dimly to suspect the existence of a force — as potent and all-pervading — hitherto disguised under the names, or rather the adjectives, centrifugal, negative, expansive, explosive, and elastic.

In Apoleia I found the existence of this force clearly recognized, and its methods so thoroughly understood that it was made the agent of some of the grandest operations there, and especially used as a medium of communication with the three beautiful satellites by which the planet was attended. ¶

Calculating with the nicest exactness the amount of repulsion required to take them within the sphere of lunar gravitation, the Apoleians had constructed machines for its generation, or rather development (which I understood about as clearly as the Camanches do the Pacific Telegraph), and invented a system of ethereal navigation, as regular and reliable as our ocean steamers, and apparently far safer. By this means the satellites, being in physical constitution very like their primary, had become mere outlying provinces, one of which, I was amused to learn, had been used for ages as an asylum for incurable egotists, egotism being regarded in Apoleia as the most dangerous and disagreeable form of insanity. Would Luna be available for any such use, I wonder ?

The extension of this system of ethereal navigation to more distant worlds —with some of which what was styled a “ magnetic sympathy ” had already been established — was, I learned, one of the great problems of the age. The chief difficulties in the way of its solution consisted, so far as I was able to understand, in the immense amount of repulsive force required, and the intense darkness and cold of the interstellar spaces, coupled with some apprehended difference in the electrical condition of the planetary photospheres, which would make their passage, by beings un—what shall I call it ? We have no word but unacclimated — dangerous, if not impossible.

how, whatever I may do myself, I do not of course expect my readers to receive anything merely upon Apoleian testimony ; and, though I seemed to understand it at the time, I confess I do not now see clearly how the hypothesis of planetary photospheres can be reconciled with the recent discoveries in spectrum analysis ; but these beings certainly spoke of theirs as familiarly as we do of our atmosphere; and doubtless, upon the mere ground of credibility, a belief in the existence of gaseous envelopes intensely susceptible to electric influences, surrounding all the suns and planets, and exchanging, so to speak, their light and heat, is quite as tenable as the notion of millions of millions of globes of incandescent matter can be.

And, certainly, whether the Apoleians were right or wrong about photospheres, their knowledge of the laws and relations of light was far in advance of ours, and the perfection and power of their optical instruments such, that they were even enabled to become tolerably conversant with the condition of their sister planets.

When I became aware of this, I was of course very curious to learn the extent of their acquaintance with the state of things upon earth, — a curiosity I was instantly enabled to gratify. And here let me say, though I was as perfectly cognizant of these beings as of the men and women now around me, they seemed to be quite unconscious of me ; and even in regard to my demon, whose faculties I could use, and upon whose knowledge and experience I could draw at pleasure, I never could be quite sure whether he was aware of me or not. As, for instance, now, when, at the instant I wished for it, a telescope (I suppose I must call it a telescope, though it seemed much more like a pair of spectacles) was adjusted and my native planet singled out for observation, I could not positively determine whether he was obeying my suggestion, or following a coincident impulse of his own.

But my native planet — the third from the sun, with its one satellite, — there could be no mistaking its identity; yet what had befallen it? This world of waters, with its dank, hot, vapory, atmosphere, its long, low reaches of sandy beach, in lieu of continents, its wave-washed islands without inhabitant,— so barren, so desolate, so drearrily unfamiliar to my sight, and yet so strangely familiar to my thought,— where had I seen it ? what was it like ? could this be Earth ? Slowly and with a terrible effort, — an effort which, explain it how you will, was distinctly one of memory, — the truth dawned upon me; and, with a thrill of inexpressible awe and wonder I recognized it. It was Earth, indeed ; but, reader, it was the Earth of the Devonian period ! And those æons of ages teeming with life and beauty and enjoyment, Whither had they flown ? what had become of them ? Was the great clock of time tolling its hours over again ? Was the past repeating itself? Or had Eternity, Saturn-like, devoured its own offspring ?

Turning in hopeless bewilderment from a problem I dared not attempt to solve, I essayed to gain some further knowledge of the pursuits of the Apoleian savans; and here again my demon, though himself intensely absorbed in another occupation, seemed to obey instinctively my slightest suggestion.

Astronomers and mathematicians I found intently occupied in computing the elements and determining the orbits of some recently discovered members of a system of universes, in which our Via Lactea was believed to hold a conspicuous place ; and I further learned that the existence of numerous similar systems, indeed of a system of systems, had been fully demonstrated.

Chemists and physicists were all absorbed in the attempted resolution of primordial elements, and the recombination of the ultimate atoms into new forms, in imitation of a process which had recently been detected, by a method analogous to spectrum analysis, in the light of some nascent nebulæ ; and the successful termination of their experiments was expected to herald a new era in the agricultural condition of the planet.

Physicians and physiologists were exploring the innermost recesses of the living Apoleian body by the aid of a sort of photo-microscope which enabled them to witness, and even, in some degree, to regulate, the most delicate processes of vital action, without the slightest inconvenience to the subject, — a vast improvement, certainly, upon Monsieur Magendie’s dying puppies.

As to the scientific dilettanti of the planet, I found them, as is common with these gentry, somewhat ponderously amusing themselves — in this case by means of incomprehensible paraphernalia of lenses, batteries, and magnets —in playing tricks upon the inhabitants of adjacent worlds. Have we any such mischievous neighbors, I wonder, and may the superhuman phenomena of spiritualism be charged to the amateur naturalists of Venus or Mars ?

But the problem of problems, the solution of which all Apoleia awaited breathlessly, as we but lately awaited the laying of the ocean cable, was one the nature and object of which I found myself, at first, totally incompetent to understand.

And yet I was, as it were, enveloped, surrounded, permeated by it; for my demon seemed to be the very soul and centre of the undertaking, literally to live and move and have his being in it. I have no words to describe to you the indomitable will, the unwearied patience, the exhaustless energy, the unflagging zeal, the utter and intense consecration and cumulation of every faculty, which this strange being brought to bear upon it ; and when, dimly and by slow degrees, the nature and intention of the stupendous project dawned upon me, language would be equally powerless to express my amazement and consternation.

A mad, presumptuous, hopeless, heaven-daring; scheme, it yet seemed to be, somehow, the very outgrowth and culmination of Apoleian civilization, For the Apoleians were, emphatically, what we should style, in modern earthly parlance, a race of humanitarians. If I were to attempt to convey to you a notion of their sociology, I should describe it, in a word, as philanthropy run mad. Every possible and impossible scheme, for the removal or amelioration of every conceivable and inconceivable ill which Apoleian flesh was heir to, seemed to have been tried. All systems of religion, politics, and philosophy were brought to this test, and accepted or rejected as they stood or fell before it; and no Apoleian savant, statesman, or theologian might presume to rest in peace upon his couch of compressed hydrogen, while so much as a crumpled rose leaf, real or metaphorical, disturbed the repose of the merest boor upon the planet. And the Apoleians were still more emphatically a race of theorists and experimenters. As no problem was counted by them too difficult for solution so no hypothesis was deemed too improbable for experiment and no experiment too daring for attempt. Theories the wildest, schemes the most illusory, were coolly submitted to this crucial test, and exploded without causing in their projectors a visible tremor. And the Apoleians were also, in the fullest acceptation of the word, a race of re-formers. Prying with curious eyes into the very innermost of Nature’s secret laboratories, their busy brains essayed to improve upon her most ingenious processes, and their itching fingers to remodel her most intricate machinery. The equilibrium of climates and the resolution of elements are but samples of the heights they aspired to scale, and the depths they attempted to sound, in these daring efforts at readjustment.

And this new scheme, furnishing, as it did, ample room and verge enough for the broadest philanthropy, the wildest hypothesis, the most daring experiment, the most radical and far-reaching reform, seemed, as it were, to have taken the race by storm. Its modus operandi I never even attempted to investigate, but its nature and object I may, perhaps, be able to make clear to you.

In Apoleia the sun was considered, not, as with us, the mere torch and fireplace of the system, but the glorious centre and source of all light and life and beauty and enjoyment, -— the home of immortal youth, eternal vigor, unending felicity. Gazing upward, day by day, at its ineffable splendors, rapt Apoleians deemed themselves to be looking straight into heaven. And such a heaven ! No shadow ever dimmed the glory of those radiant plains ; no tempest ever ruffled the clear serene of that calm atmosphere ; no sting of pain, no blighting breath of care, no pang of sorrow, ever pierced those battlements of light to wound the happy dwellers there. That glorious sun-life was the motive of endeavor, the goal of aspiration, the ultimatum of desire, — a fruitful theme for the profoundest speculation of sages, the fairest dreams of poets, the loftiest inspiration of prophets and divines.

Good Apoleians were believed to reach it, when they died ; but death in Apoleia was not the near and patent thing it is with us. Methuselah, in his thousandth year, would have passed for a youth among those ancients. Death was a very angel, making his visits few and far between ; and so, in place of regarding him, as we do, with alternate horror and forgetfulness, they would have come to watch for him with a ceaseless longing, but for one thing, — low be it spoken, — all Apoleians were not good.

Here was the respect which made calamity of what had else been a happy release. Here was the rub, but for which they might have become a race of suicides.

Looking upon the sun as the visible heaven of the system, they had come by a natural consequence to regard heaven as a place rather than a state ; and yet that glorious sun-life, as it was a life of physical, must be also a life of moral and spiritual, purity and perfection ; and if so, many of the race would be excluded from it even after death.

Here was a flaw in the creative scheme, calling loudly for the exercise of Apoleian philanthropy, challenging boldly the attacks of Apoleian reform. The manifest remedy, of course, was to make everybody good ; but how ? Legislation they had tried ad nauseam, and it had failed them utterly ; moral suasion they had also tried, with little better success ; they had small hope from the “ foolishness of preaching”; and so they put them all aside for a scheme in which there were only physical impossibilities to encounter.

The problem was briefly this : to neutralize or overcome by slow degrees the action of the repulsive (centrifugal) force, and so let the planet down by easy stages, in gradually narrowing circles, to the sun !

The nearer contemplation of that glorious life, the closer and more direct action of that subtle vivifying magnetism, would surely work a change in the spiritual nature (for the Apoleians held that the spiritual was only a refinement of the physical) of the whole race ; and the final passage of that radiant sea of purest matter, the sun,s photosphere, would purge and purify, like a refiner’s fire, the grosser elements of both the planet and its inhabitants, and fit them respectively for absorption into the substance and participation in the life of the central orb.

And, after all, it was but anticipating the final inevitable catastrophe ; for the Apoleians held both our nebula hypothesis and our Spencerian theory of a chain of sequences (with the slight improvement of tying the two ends together, and thus manufacturing a miniature infinity) ; and having, moreover, an Encke of their own, reasoned thus : “ Apoleia had sprung from the bosom of the sun ; all events moved in circles, eternally repeating themselves ; the known existence of a resisting medium involved such a necessity ; therefore Apoleia was destined to return again to the place from whence it came. It was a consummation devoutly to be wished, and the more imminent the more devoutly ; but it might be ages in arriving. The resisting medium was, certainly, fearfully attenuated, the circle of sequences tediously slow in its revolutions. Why wait for them ? ”

The effect of such reasoning upon such minds may be imagined, but scarcely described. The whole people set themselves, as one man, to solve the mighty problem ; and it was counted a happy augury that none were more eager in their interest, or more strenuous in their exertions, than the ne’er-doweels for whose benefit it was proposed.

Hypothesis after hypothesis was framed and exploded ; plan after plan was projected and abandoned; experiment after experiment was tried and proved abortive ; the brains of the race were racked to the verge of insanity; the nerves of the race were strung to their utmost tension. It was a very war of the Titans,— intellect versus force, i. e. WILL versus WILL ; and the struggle had been going on for ages, when my demon suddenly came forward with a scheme, which, certain conditions fulfilled and certain dangers avoided, was conceded on all hands to offer a reasonable prospect of success.

From that hour he was the acknowledged autocrat of the planet. Kings bowed before him and nations did him reverence, sages were his slaves, and statesmen the veriest creatures of his will ; all wit and wisdom, all power and wealth, were placed at his command, and right royally did he use them. Clear-headed and single-eyed, without a sign of self-assertion, or a thought of self-aggrandizement, he held resolutely, utterly, magnificently to his purpose.

The details of the scheme, as I said, I never attempted even to investigate. The slightest effort in this direction utterly bewildered and confounded me. Thus much only I know, that its successful prosecution involved, at the outset, the necessity of tunnelling the planet; and that for this end, as might be supposed, machinery the most elaborate, forces the most potent, care the most vigilant, energy the most unflagging, watchfulness the most incessant, were required and employed.

Ponderous engines ripped open the very bowels of the planet, powerful acids noiselessly dissolved its firm foundations, mephitic gases extinguished its nether fires ; and thus day after day, year after year, as it seemed to me, the work went on, until at last, suddenly, unexpectedly, as it appeared, to every one, the supreme moment for testing the success of this part of the experiment arrived.

Some powerful agent was to be employed, some potent energy released, which had never been tried before. All Apoleia held its breath, and awaited, in speechless, agonized suspense, the dictum of its presiding genius. He had never been so calm, never so confident. Coolly, almost gayly, he gave the final orders ; and I, his other, inner self, could feel the thrill of triumphant exultation with which he hailed in advance the victorious result, It came, — with a roar which might have startled the universe, with a shock which must have shaken the system to its centre, with an explosion which shattered Apoleia and her satellites into fragments, and sent them wandering forever and forever, in helpless, hopeless, aimless, useless confusion, through the realms of space ! Was Reichenbach right ? Had I — through the agency of some strange being who, ages before, had formed and informed that magnet — witnessed the catastrophe which produced the asteroids ? Or, was it indeed an act of memory, — memory which had slumbered for ages ? Was he — was I — some previous existence ? — or —