continental masses of ice. Again (Bulletin de l'Academie Royale de
Belgique, June) M. Nesten averred that the changes on the surface of
Mars were periodic.

In 1889, Prof. Schiaparelli reviewed what had been observed upon the
surface of the planet in a continued article in _Himmel und Erde_, a
popular astronomical journal published by the Gesellschaft Urania and
edited by Dr. Meyer.

Some remarkable photographs taken by Mr. Wilson in 1890 were commented
on by Prof. W.H. Pickering in the "Sidereal Messenger." They showed the
seasonal variations in the polar white blotches.

In 1889 there reached us from Chatto and Windus of London a most
entertaining book by Hugh MacColl, entitled "Mr. Stranger's Sealed
Packet." It was a work of fancy, ingeniously constructed upon scientific
principles. It described a hypothetical machine, a flying machine, which
was made up of a substance more than half of whose mass had been
converted into repelling particles. Such a fabric would leave the earth,
pass the limits of its attraction with an accelerating velocity and move
through space. In such a way Mr. Stranger reached Mars. He found it
inhabited by a people--the Marticoli--happy in a state of socialism, and
with abundance of food manufactured from the elements, oxygen, hydrogen,
carbon and nitrogen, with electric lights, phonetic speech, but without
gunpowder or telescopes.

Its inhabitants had been derived from the earth by a most delightful
scientific fabrication. A sun and its satellites in its course around
some other center draws the earth and Mars so together that on some
parts of the earth's surface the attraction of Mars would overcome that