and that if every star seen in the firmament were as bright as the Centaur or Arcturus they would not, all put together, give more than a hundredth part of the light of the moon. As to their being inhabited, wise men who reason and doubt seem as divided as ever, and even more than ever inclined to admit that neither theology nor astronomy can at present make out anything certain even in the form of conjecture. As Dr. Whewell well says, "the certainty stops just where these speculations begin." Anyhow they must be a singular race of beings that inhabit these sparklers, if we can judge by our neighbours. Earth produces some queer creatures, but astronomers tell us that the planets of our ken, from where Mercury is almost lost in the wasting blaze of the sun to where, far on the remotest confines of our system the giant Neptune rolls in lonely state, if peopled at all must be peopled by a race of creatures more like gnomes and witches than aught human. It is more than doubtful whether some of these have an atmosphere at all for human beings to breathe in, and so far as conjecture and induction can guide us we may assume that none of them would suit us very well, as will appear from the following brief summary of their physical condition.

Both Newton and Humboldt are of opinion that the stars are most probably of the same materials as the earth. Herschel the elder and Laplace shared this view to a great extent. The meteorites have been found to contain no simple body, no earth or metal not known as an element of our globe.* What is however inte

Wilson's Religio Chemici, p. 80.

resting is, that they have as yet been only found to contain less than a third of the known number. The metals far predominate over the non-metals in these bodies. Their composition then is such, that if the planets be like them they cannot support earthly life as we understand the phrase.

Furthermore, Mercury is nearly seven times, occasionally nearly eleven times as light as the sun, so that a human being would be struck blind instantly, while the heat is computed to be so great that his eyes would be boiled in his head. In the hottest part of this planet water would be always at boiling heat, and "most inflammatory substances be dissipated and destroyed."* We may therefore assume that the natives have no eyes or that they are no bigger than pin-holes. They must also be quite accustomed to extreme vicissitudes of weather, as winter succeeds autumn and summer follows spring quite four times as rapidly as with us, in consequence of the year not being quite three months in duration; a strong contrast to Jupiter whose seasons are nearly thirty times as long as ours. Venus is only twice as light as the sun, so that if a man could go about with his eyes shut he might get on; dress, we may presume, is dispensed with on this planet, as the greatest heat of Venus exceeds that of Borneo and Sumatra just as much as their summer exceeds in heat that of the Orkneys.

Again Mars, the red and sullen Mars, appears to be made of cast-iron in a state of rust, except at the poles where it is covered with snow; by some writers he

Bonnycastle's Introduction to Astronomy.

has been compared to a globe of ochre. On this stern-looking continent winter lasts nearly a year at the poles without any change, and as a consolation to those who are interested in the fate of the inhabitants, we are told that the warmest part of the climate is not much colder than many parts of Norway or Lapland in the spring. However Mars may still possess a vegetation of its kind, as some of the french botanists have I believe shown that seeds will germinate pretty well upon a fly-wheel. As for the moon, all the water with which she was partially covered in ancient times seems to have boiled out of her, so that there is nothing to drink there. There is no air to breathe, and therefore only a person capable of living quite at ease in the vacuum of an air-pump could manage at all. Perhaps a few beetles or salamanders may pick up a precarious livelihood, but they must have rather an uneasy time of it, as there is not a vestige of anything for them to eat so far as we can see. Moreover one side of their abode is so cold as instantly to freeze brandy, or about a hundred degrees below zero, while the other is about the heat of boiling water. As a residence for astronomers she certainly presents the immense advantage of enabling them to watch a planet three hundred and fifty-four hours at a stretch, the night at the equator being of this length, but for persons who don't care about looking at the stars, her annular mountains, "fresh from the mould, and formed, as it were, of frosted silver," her endless hills and chasms, her ridiculous seas of nectar, tranquillity and the like, after all mean simply that she is a hideous, hopeless waste, full of holes like great beetle-traps, and the reader will most

likely forgive Hooke for trying to show that she is very like a boiled alabaster pudding.

Pallas and Vesta have so little gravity that a man might easily jump from fifty to a hundred feet on them, and an "India-rubber Voltigeur" or "Bounding Brother of the Wild Prairie" would leap over St. Paul's, if indeed St. Paul's would stand steady there, which is rather doubtful. Giants too, like those of which Pliny and Horace Walpole wrote, and lizards of the most fabulous dimensions, might there live comfortably on land, and whales like those on which the ancient mariners cast anchor might bask on the ocean, which is more than they could do here. Jupiter, on the contrary, could only be inhabited by pigmies or goblins like Gylpin Horner. A traveller from this world, Mr. Coxwell or Mr. Glaisher in his balloon, alighting on Jupiter would take root at once, and if he were to make his way to the sun instead, he would be as instantly crushed to the shape of a jellyfish by his own weight as if he were put into a hydraulic press. While some of the planets seem almost as hard as flint, Saturn appears to be only like a great piece of cork; an earthquake must make the whole globe ring like a drum or crack from one end to the other. Jupiter himself is almost like water, and Uranus is even lighter than water itself, so that an enterprizing miner, if he penetrated too far into either, might drop through with all his gear into space, unless he had the good luck to stick fast in the central. nucleus which is thought to be as stiff as clay. To live in comfort on the surface of Jupiter, a man's brain would have to be made of something as hard as

2 R

bone or cast-iron, in order to defy the giddiness arising from the terrific rate at which the planet revolves, especially as from water being as heavy there as quicksilver is here, people would have to drink hydrogen gas or something of that kind. Bathing of any kind must be hazardous work, and local knowledge highly advantageous to those who must bathe, as even a young lady would weigh nearly two stone heavier at the poles than at the equator, and people in Saturn are even worse off in this respect.

Persons who are continually grumbling at the weather, especially of England which has one of the finest climates in the world, should go to some of these planets for a change. Jupiter besides being badly lighted, so that a man would want eyes as big as cricket-balls, never has a clear sky throughout by far the greatest part of his vast surface. It is about nine hundred times as cold there as it is here, which means that it is at least ninety times as bad as a residence in January on the topmost peaks of Spitsbergen, with the north wind roaring round their awful chasms and desolate heights. If the motion of the spots on this planet be really due, as has been surmised, to the action of winds, they must travel at such a rate as to nearly rival sound itself, and rage with quite ten times the force and speed of our most furious tornadoes. There is a shrewd suspicion that much of the land of Saturn which lies under his belts is entirely without light, a state which must make these parts of the planet at least as cheerful and salubrious a residence as the polar regions in the dark months, or Terra del Fuego when it rains ice