A SHATTERED WORLD.

Otago Witness, Issue 2623, 22 June 1904, Page 67

A SHATTERED WORLD.

By a Bankeb,

On the first day of the lasfc century a diminutive planet, so small that 46 thousand of similar size would be required to equal the volume of the earth, was discovered in a blank space in the solar system where, judging from analogy, an ordinary planet should have revolved. Since then, m the same blank space, nearly 500 of these asteriods have been discovered revolving round the sun, nearly all of them being very considerably smaller than the pioneer of then a'l, and poweiful telescopes fail to glimpse them, though the eagle eye of tho camera unerringly records their passage.

It is conjectured by scientists that these little planetoids are fragments of a large planet which in the remote past was either shattered by a collision with tome body wandering in space, or broken up by sonic tremendous internal explosion.

We may be certain that there are no inhabitants on these revolving globes ; at anyrafce that there are none constituted as we are, for the specific gravity must be so insignificant that beings like ourselves would have difficulty in keeping to the surface, and could vault off into sprtco, when they too would continue whirling round tho sun until the veiy crack of doom

But what a strange and remarkable spectacle must tho hea-vens bs as viewed from, for instance, Vesta, the most bright and beautiful of them all. For, although many of those in the opposite regions of their orbit would be invisible, yet tlie midnight skies must be studded with innumerable shining bodies, some not so brilliant as the stars, but multitudes of others, of varied sizes and (it is believed) of irregular and heterogeneous shape and configuration. ! There perhaps in the zenith a great scarlet elongated object slowly rotating as it travels onwards. Here another, rmre white — for they are of varied hue— perhaps a stretch of chalk cliff wrer>ched from the parent oib at the disruption and hurled' iiito the ether ; or a range . of mountains, or an island, or a fragment of n, continent, bodily rent from its foundations and launched out into space, soon settling down to the regular orbit which it maintains until this day. And in all directions spherical orbs formed by the molten matter of the interior of the shattered planet, some comparatively large, some small, but all shining in varied intensity &nd lustre.

And wliat a scone urust have been enacted ivLen this tremendous tragedy of the sides iook place ; a world peacefully performing its appointed round crashed and wiecked in a monient of time, 'obliterated from the uvu\erse, blotted out from amongst thei galaxies of the skies. Aiid so with mankind. "\V7ien t!-"> spear o£ the angel of death pierces the heait, in a momont, in the twinkling of an eye, the soul quits its mortal tenement, and flie3 either to the realms of glory or of condemnation. To the former if, abstaining from wilful wronsj, the accusing record is cancelled thiough tha Saviour having borne the punishment due ; to the ipxltv if God has been forgotten and his I -commands disobeyed, ' *