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President," replied Ardan after a pause. "It's a fact. I
acknowledge the corn, as Marston says. But how you positive fellows do
knock holes into our pretty little creations of fancy!"

"Don't feel so bad about it, Ardan;" observed M'Nicholl; "though there
may be no orb from which gravity is excluded altogether, we shall soon
land in one, where it is much less powerful than on the Earth."

"You mean the Moon!"

"Yes, the Moon. Her mass being 1/89 of the Earth's, her attractive power
should be in the same proportion; that is, a boy 10 years old, whose
weight on Earth is about 90 lbs., would weigh on the Moon only about 1
pound, if nothing else were to be taken into consideration. But when
standing on the surface of the Moon, he is relatively 4 times nearer to
the centre than when he is standing on the surface of the Earth. His
weight, therefore, having to be increased by the square of the distance,
must be sixteen times greater. Now 16 times 1/89 being less than 1/5, it
is clear that my weight of 150 pounds will be cut down to nearly 30 as
soon as we reach the Moon's surface."

"And mine?" asked Ardan.

"Yours will hardly reach 25 pounds, I should think," was the reply.

"Shall my muscular strength diminish in the same proportion?" was the
next question.

"On the contrary, it will be relatively so much the more increased that
you can take a stride 15 feet in width as easily as you can now take one
of ordinary length."

"We shall be all Samsons, then, in the Moon!" cried Ardan.

"Especially," replied M'Nicholl, "if the stature of the Selenites is in
proportion to the mass of their globe."

"If so, what should be their height?"

"A tall man would hardly be twelve inches in his boots!"

"They must be veritable Lilliputians then!" cried Ardan; "and we are all
to be Gullivers! The old myth of the Giants realized! Perhaps the Titans
that played such famous parts in the prehistoric period of our Earth,
were adventurers like ourselves, casually arrived from some great
planet!"

"Not from such planets as _Mercury_, _Venus_ or _Mars_ anyhow, friend
Michael," observed Barbican. "But the inhabitants of _Jupiter_,
_Saturn_, _Uranus,_ or _Neptune_, if they bear the same proportion to
their planet that we do ours, must certainly be regular Brobdignagians."

"Let us keep severely away from all planets of the latter class then,"
said Ardan. "I never liked to play the part of Lilliputian myself. But
how about the Sun, Barbican? I always had a hankering after the Sun!"

"The Sun's volume is about 1-1/3 million times greater than that of the
Earth, but his density being only about 1/4, the attraction on his
surface is hardly 30 times greater than that of our globe. Still, every
proportion observed, the inhabitants of the Sun can't be much less than
150 or 160 feet in height."

"_Mille tonnerres!_" cried Ardan, "I should be there like Ulysses among
the Cyclops! I'll tell you what it is, Barbican; if we ever decide on

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