IJST A WOULD HALF AS LARGE. 681 



If, feeling so spry, lie thinks he will play a little, he is again 

 surprised to find that while he could formerly leap only to the height 

 of his hips, he can now jump twice as high as his head. If the 

 Eiff el Tower is near by, and he climbs it, he gets to the top four times 

 as quickly as formerly. If he lives in Savoy and climbs Mont 

 Blanc, he feels only one fourth the fatigue of the olden time, and 

 will be very apt to think that somebody has given him a very full 

 dose of some invigorating extract while he was asleep. He is no 

 less astonished when he finds how little danger there is in falling. 

 His child falls down a whole story without being hurt, and he drops 

 fragile things, his water pitcher, for example, without their breaking. 



In the same way, but inversely, the inhabitant of Mars, trans- 

 planted to the earth, would feel four times as heavy: his leaps would 

 be only a quarter as high; the steps, going up and down stairs, would 

 be four times too high, although they would look the same as ever. 

 Any climb, not to speak of the Eiffel Tower or of Mont Blanc, 

 would take away his breath ; and he would be ready to think he had 

 all at once become decrepit. 



Fairy stories, and such humorists as Swift and Voltaire, have 

 made us familiar with the idea that there may be cities of dwarfs 

 and of giants copied exactly from ours; and we do not perceive, at 

 first sight, why they should not have their Paris, with the Louvre, 

 boulevards, and hotels, built after earthly models. We could easily 

 fancy that if Gulliver, arriving at Lilliput or Brobdingnag, had be- 

 come smaller or larger, according to the measure of his hosts, he 

 would not have remarked the diminutiveness of Lilliput and the 

 Lilliputians, or the great size of Brobdingnag, and the Brobdingna- 

 gians. This fancy is the more natural at first sight because we have 

 invented the art of drawing and other arts relating to it, and the 

 microscope and photography show us every day considerable enlarge- 

 ments and diminutions without alteration of shapes. 



It is, however, not consistent with the most incontestable results 

 of science. The cat is not an exact reduction of the tiger, or the 

 Lilliputian of the Brobdingnagian, any more than a small crystal of 

 alum is a reduction of a large crystal although one regular octa- 

 hedron may be the exact image of another octahedron. For if they 

 were, there would no longer be a question of atoms, or molecules, 

 or cells. From the geometrical point of view the cell, the molecule, 

 and the atom are infinitely divisible universes, and therefore capable 

 of containing all imaginable figures within their limits; while from 

 the chemical and physiological point of view they are absolute quan- 

 tities not capable of reduction in their kind. 



Now let us see if a Martian house can be constructed wholly on 

 the plan of an earthly house that is, if it can be made to present the 



VOL. LII. 50 



