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from the central mountain. Into one of the craters Mount Blane 
might be dropped, and its summit would not go to the top of the 
crater. They had more accurate maps of the moon than they 
had of certain parts of the globe. 
Coming to the planets, he noticed that it was very interesting 
to watch the changes which Mercury and Venus undergo. If 
there were any people on Mercury, they must be constituted very 
different from ourselves. The best time to see Venus was in the 
day time in a good telescope, because the light was almost 
distressing at night. It was charming to watch the changes of 
that beautiful lady. 
Mars is the planet of sensation, It is supposed by some 
people to be inhabited with life like our own, and that the inhabi- 
tants are signalling to us with all their might to attract our 
attention to enter into some kind of relationship with us. It is 
only once in fifteen years that Mars gets into a favourable 
position for us, and it is thirty-five million miles away from us 
at its nearest opposition. He ridiculed the idea of the double 
canal theory on Mars, but was not sceptical with regard to the 
possibility of life on Mars or any other world. Probably in the 
boundless universe there were boundless types of life, but 
whether there was life or not, or what sort of life it was, no man 
could say. The man in the street was quite as good a judge of 
the question as the astronomer royal himself, and where one did 
not know, one had no right to say. Science was nothing if she 
was not absolutely truthful and proceeded from a position which 
was verifiable. ‘The charming study of Jupiter was to observe 
its satellite phenomena. The rings were made up of countless 
millions of meteor moons running round the body of the planet. 
There were millions of stars in both hemispheres, but only six 
thousand that could be detected without a telescope. He ex- 
plained from the different movements of the earth that the pole 
star of the future, in thirteen thousand years, would be the Vega, 
the bright star in the northern heavens. 
Siars in constellation, clusters of stars, and the milky way 
were next explained, as was also the nebular hypothesis. No 
one, he said, could doubt that the nebular theory of the universe 
was the correct one and he showed slides illustrating worlds in 
the process of being made. They were sometimes told that if 
they lived on some planets with multiple suns they would be 
much better than they were here, but he was thankful he lived 
on a planet that had only one sun, and a planet which had night 
as well as day ; they saw the stars in the dark, if it were not for 
the dark they would never have known of these wonders of the 
universe. Though that was not a sermon or a religious society, 
he could not help saying it was something like that in the 
