in their ephemerides their places are shown with as much accurateness as
those of Jupiter or Venus in your almanacks; the parallax of the fixed
stars nearest them is as well understood as that of their own sun, and
they possess a magnificent history of the changes taking place in the
heavens and which are governed by laws that it would be vain for me to
attempt to give you an idea of. They are acquainted with the revolutions
and uses of comets; they understand the system of those meteoric
formations of stones which have so much astonished you on earth; and they
have histories in which the gradual changes of nebulas in their progress
towards systems have been registered, so that they can predict their
future changes. And their astronomical records are not like yours which
go back only twenty centuries to the time of Hipparchus; they embrace a
period a hundred times as long, and their civil history for the same time
is as correct as their astronomical one. As I cannot describe to you the
organs of these wonderful beings, so neither can I show to you their
modes of life; but as their highest pleasures depend upon intellectual
pursuits, so you may conclude that those modes of life bear the strictest
analogy to that which on the earth you would call exalted virtue. I will
tell you however that they have no wars, and that the objects of their
ambition are entirely those of intellectual greatness, and that the only
passion that they feel in which comparisons with each other can be
instituted are those dependent upon a love of glory of the purest kind.
If I were to show you the different parts of the surface of this planet,
you would see marvellous results of the powers possessed by these highly
intellectual beings and of the wonderful manner in which they have
applied and modified matter. Those columnar masses, which seem to you as
if arising out of a mass of ice below, are results of art, and processes
are going on in them connected with the formation and perfection of their
food. The brilliant coloured fluids are the results of such operations
as on the earth would be performed in your laboratories, or more properly