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where all these cocks and hens have come from."

"These cocks and hens?"

"Yes."

Ardan threw a glance of comical bewilderment on half a dozen or so of
splendid barn-yard fowls that were now beginning to recover from the
effects of the oxygen. For an instant he could not utter a word; then,
shrugging his shoulders, he muttered in a low voice:

"Catastrophe prematurely exploded!"

"What are you going to do with these chickens?" persisted Barbican.

"Acclimatize them in the Moon, by Jove! what else?" was the ready reply.

"Why conceal them then?"

"A hoax, a poor hoax, dear President, which proves a miserable failure!
I intended to let them loose on the Lunar Continent at the first
favorable opportunity. I often had a good laugh to myself, thinking of
your astonishment and the Captain's at seeing a lot of American poultry
scratching for worms on a Lunar dunghill!"

"Ah! wag, jester, incorrigible _farceur_!" cried Barbican with a smile;
"you want no nitrous oxide to put a bee in your bonnet! He is always as
bad as you and I were for a short time, M'Nicholl, under the laughing
gas! He's never had a sensible moment in his life!"

"I can't say the same of you," replied Ardan; "you had at least one
sensible moment in all your lives, and that was about an hour ago!"

Their incessant chattering did not prevent the friends from at once
repairing the disorder of the interior of the Projectile. Cocks and hens
were put back in their cages. But while doing so, the friends were
astonished to find that the birds, though good sized creatures, and now
pretty fat and plump, hardly felt heavier in their hands than if they
had been so many sparrows. This drew their interested attention to a new
phenomenon.

From the moment they had left the Earth, their own weight, and that of
the Projectile and the objects therein contained, had been undergoing a
progressive diminution. They might never be able to ascertain this fact
with regard to the Projectile, but the moment was now rapidly
approaching when the loss of weight would become perfectly sensible,
both regarding themselves and the tools and instruments surrounding
them. Of course, it is quite clear, that this decrease could not be
indicated by an ordinary scales, as the weight to balance the object
would have lost precisely as much as the object itself. But a spring
balance, for instance, in which the tension of the coil is independent
of attraction, would have readily given the exact equivalent of the
loss.

Attraction or weight, according to Newton's well known law, acting in
direct proportion to the mass of the attracting body and in inverse
proportion to the square of the distance, this consequence clearly
follows: Had the Earth been alone in space, or had the other heavenly
bodies been suddenly annihilated, the further from the Earth the
Projectile would be, the less weight it would have. However, it would
never _entirely_ lose its weight, as the terrestrial attraction would

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