her attraction and be drawn to the earth, reaching it at the rate of some
seven miles a second.

"Now we all know--this is the way the story runs--that the moon was once
inhabited by a highly intelligent race. They tell us it is a cold, dead
world now, not at all fit for inhabitants. But that is because its day is
passed. Being so much smaller than the earth it cooled off quicker, and
its life-bearing period long since found its end. Men have often
speculated on the idea that our race will one day fail and the time come
when the last generation shall pass away and leave the earth a bare and
ugly thing, to continue yet longer its lonely, weary journey around a
failing sun. That day the moon has seen. That direful fate the race of
moon men have experienced. Some poor being, the last of his kind, was left
sole monarch of a dying world, and with the moon all before him where to
choose, chose rather to die with the rest and leave his world to cold and
darkness.

"From our own experience we do not know how high a state of civilization
can be reached by giving a race all the time that is needed. But we know
that before the inhabitants of the moon passed off the stage they had
attained to the highest possible degree of intelligence. They began
existence at a very low plane, developed gradually through long periods of
time--there has never been any haste in these matters--and when they had
reached their maturity as a race of intellectual and moral beings,
primitive man was just beginning on the vast undertaking of subduing the
earth, a task not yet accomplished.

"The incident I propose to relate occurred in antediluvian times, when
there were giants in the earth who lived a thousand years. Then matter
reigned, not mind. It was the age of brawn. Everything material existed on