es were removed, we should find it impossible to
convince the people of the earth that we had really been to the moon. I
have since found that the Brahmin was more right in his last argument,
than I then believed possible.

I am not able to say what effect these representations of the Brahmin
would have produced, if they had not been taken up and enforced by the
political rival of him who had first opposed our departure; but by his
powerful aid they finally triumphed, and we obtained a formal permission
to leave the moon whenever, we thought proper.

As we meant to return in the same machine in which we came, we were not
long in preparing for our voyage. We proposed to set out about the
middle of the night; and we passed the chief part of the interval in
making visits of ceremony, and in calling on those who had shown us
civility. I endeavoured also, to collect such articles as I thought
would be most curious and rare in my own country, and most likely to
produce conviction with those who might be disposed to question the fact
of my voyage. I was obliged, however, to limit myself to such things as
were neither bulky nor weighty, the Brahmin thinking that after we had
taken in our instruments and the necessary provisions, we could not
safely take more than twenty or thirty pounds in addition.

Some of my lunar curiosities, which I thought would be most new and
interesting to my countrymen, have proved to be very familiar to our men
of science. This has been most remarkably the case with my mineral
specimens. Of the leaves and flowers of above seventy plants, which I
brought, more than forty are found on the earth, and several of these
grow in my native State. With the insects I have been more successful;
but some of these, as well as of the plants, I am assured, are found on
the coasts of the Pacific, or in the islands of that ocean; which fact,
by the way, gives a farther support to the Brahmin's hypothesis.

Besides the productions of nature that I have mentioned, I procured some
specimens of their cloth, a few light toys, a lady's turban decorated
with cantharides, a pair of slippers with heavy metallic soles, which
are used there for walking in a strong wind, and by the dancing girls to
prevent their jumping too high. As this metal, which gravitates to the
moon, is repelled from the earth, these slippers assist the wearer here
in springing from the ground as much as they impeded it in the moon, and
therefore I hav