dancing round their sun, who happens to be
one of the fixed company, to the old tune of
Sun in the middle and can't get out. Some of
the planets run close, and some run in a wide
round, some dance round briskly, and some slip
slowly along. Once round is a year, and Saturn,
dancing in a wide round outside ours, so that
in each round he has about nine times as far
to go, moves at a pace about three times slower
than ours. His year, therefore, is some twenty-
seven times longer; in fact, a year in the House
of Saturn is as much as twenty-nine years five
months and sixteen days in our part of the
world. What, therefore, we should consider
to be an old man of eighty-eight, would pass
with Saturn for a three-year-old.

A hundred and fifty years ago, Bishop
Wilkins did not see why some of his posterity
should not find out a conveyance to the moon,
and if there be inhabitants, have commerce with
them. The first twenty miles, he said, is all
the difficulty; and why, he asked, writing
before balloons had been discovered, may we not
get over that? No doubt there are difficulties.
The journey, if made at the rate of a thousand
miles a day, would take half a year; and there
would be much trouble from the want of inns
upon the road. Nevertheless, heaviness being
a condition of closeness and gravitation to the
earth, if one rose but the first twenty miles,
that difficulty of our weight would soon begin
to vanish, and a man—clear of the influence of
gravitation—might presently stand as firmly in
the open air as he now does upon the ground. If
stand, why not go? With our weight gone from
us, walking will be light exercise, cause little
fatigue, and need little nourishment. As to
nourishment, perhaps none may be needed, as
none is needed by those creatures who, in a
long sleep, withdraw themselves from the heavy
wear and tear of life. " To this purpose," says
Bishop Wilkins, " Mendoca reckons up divers
strange relations. As that of Epimenides, who
is storied to have slept seventy-five years. And
another of a rustic in Germany, who, being
accidentally covered with a hayrick, slept there
for all autumn and the winter following, with-
out any nourishment." Though, to be sure, the
condition of a man free of all weight is
imperfectly suggested by the man who had a
hayrick laid atop of him. But what then? Why
may not smells nourish us as we walk moonward
upon space, after escape from all the
friction and the sense of burden gravitation
brings? Plutarch and Pliny, and divers other
ancients, tell us of a nation in India that lived
only upon pleasing odours; and Democritus
was able for divers days together to feed
himself with the mere smell of hot bread. Or, if
our stomachs must be filled, may there not be
truth in the old Platonic principle, that there is
in some part of the world a place where men
might be plentifully nourished by the air they
breathe, which cannot be so likely to be true of
any other place as of the ethereal air above
this. We have heard of some creatures, and of
the serpent, that they feed only upon one
element, namely, earth. Albertus Magnus speaks
of a man who lived seven weeks together upon
the mere drinking of water. Rondoletius affirms
that his wife did keep a fish in a glass of water
without any food for three years, in which space
it was constantly augmented, till at first it
could not come out of the place at which it was
put in, and at length was too big for the glass
itself, though that were of large capacity. So
may it be with man in the ethereal air. Onions
will shoot out and grow as they hang in common
air. Birds of paradise, having no legs, live
constantly in and upon air, laying their eggs on
one another's backs, and sitting on each other
while they hatch them. Rondoletius tells, from
the history of Hermolaus Barbarus, of a priest
who lived forty years upon mere air. And, if
none of these possibilities be admitted, why, we
can take our provision with us. Once up the
twenty miles, we could carry any quantity of it
the rest of the way, for a ship-load would be
lighter than a feather. Sleep, probably, with
nothing to fatigue us, we should no longer
require; but if we did, we cannot desire a
softer bed than the air, where we may repose
ourselves firmly and safely as in our chambers.

As for that difficulty of the first twenty miles,
it is not impossible to make a flying chariot and
give it motion through the air. If possible, it
can be made large enough to carry men and
stores, for size is nothing if the motive faculty
be answerable thereto—the great ship swims as
well as the small cork, and an eagle flies in the
air as well as a little gnat. Indeed, we might
have regular Great Eastern packets plying
between London and No Gravitation Point, to
which they might take up houses, cattle, and
all stores found necessary to the gradual
construction of a town upon the borders of the
over-ether route to any of the planets. Stations
could be established, if necessary, along the
routes to the Moon, Mars, Venus, Saturn, and
the rest of the new places of resort; some London
Society could create and endow a new Bishop
of Jupiter; and daring travellers would bring us
home their journals of a Day in Saturn, or Ten
Weeks in Mars, while sportsmen might make
parties for the hippogriff shooting in Mercury,
or bag chimeras on the Mountains of the
Moon.

Well, in whatever way we may get there, we
are off now for a stroll to Saturn, with Mr. R.
A. Proctor for comrade and cicerone, but turning
a deaf ear to him whenever, as often occurs,
he is too learned for us, and asks us to " let
N P? P?? N? represent the northern half of
Saturn's orbit (viewed in perspective), n E n? E?
the earth's orbit, and N p p? p?? N? the
projection of Saturn's orbit on the plane of the
earth's orbit. Let N S N? be the line of
Saturn's nodes on this plane, and let S P? be at
right angles to N S, N?, so that when at P?
Saturn is at his greatest distance from the
ecliptic on the northern side." When of such
things we are asked to let them be, we let them
be, and are, in the denseness of our ignorance,
only too glad to be allowed, not to say asked,