sely hot that no form of life could
possibly exist upon them, and that such bodies as our moon have long
since passed the life-bearing stage, and are to all intents and purposes
defunct.

But may we not go farther? Recognising in our own world, in many
instances, what to our ideas resembles waste--waste seeds, waste lives,
waste races, waste regions, waste forces--recognising superfluity and
superabundance in all the processes and in all the works of nature,
should it not appear at least possible that some, perhaps even a large
proportion, of the worlds in the multitudinous systems peopling space,
are not only not now supporting life, but never have supported life and
never will? Does this idea differ in kind, however largely to our feeble
conceptions it may seem to differ in degree, from the idea of the
imagined creatures on a fruit, that some or even many fruits excellently
fitted for the support of life might not subserve that purpose? And as
those creatures might conceive (as we _know_) that some fruits, even
many, fail to come to the full perfection of fruit life, may not we
without irreverence conceive (as higher beings than ourselves may
_know_) that a planet or a sun may fail in the making? We cannot say
that in such a case there would be a waste or loss of material, though
we may be unable to conceive how the lost sun or planet could be
utilised. Our imagined insect reasoners would be unable to imagine that
fruits plucked from their tree system were otherwise than wasted, for
they would conceive that their idea of the purpose of fruits was the
only true one; yet they would be altogether mistaken, as we may be in
supposing the main purpose of planetary existence is the support of
life.

In like manner, when we pass in imagination beyond the limits of our
own system, we may learn a useful lesson from the imagined creatures'
reasoning about other tree systems than that to which their world
belonged. Astronomers have been apt to generalise too daringly
respecting remote stars and star systems, as though our solar system
were a true picture of all solar systems, the system of stars to which
our sun belongs a true picture of all star systems. They have been apt
to forget that, as every world in our own system has its period of life,
short by comparison with the entire duration of the world, so each solar
system, each system of such systems, may have its own life-bearing
season, infinitely long according to our conc