, have a
sphere of sensibility and intellectual enjoyment far superior to that of
the inhabitants of your earth. Each of those tubes which appears like
the trunk of an elephant is an organ of peculiar motion or sensation.
They have many modes of perception of which you are wholly ignorant, at
the same time that their sphere of vision is infinitely more extended
than yours, and their organs of touch far more perfect and exquisite. It
would be useless for me to attempt to explain their organisation, which
you could never understand; but of their intellectual objects of pursuit
I may perhaps give you some notion. They have used, modified, and
applied the material world in a manner analogous to man; but with far
superior powers they have gained superior results. Their atmosphere
being much denser than yours and the specific gravity of their planet
less, they have been enabled to determine the laws belonging to the solar
system with far more accuracy than you can possibly conceive, and any one
of those beings could show you what is now the situation and appearance
of your moon with a precision that would induce you to believe that he
saw it, though his knowledge is merely the result of calculation. Their
sources of pleasure are of the highest intellectual nature; with the
magnificent spectacle of their own rings and moons revolving round them,
with the various combinations required to understand and predict the
relations of these wonderful phenomena their minds are in unceasing
activity and this activity is a perpetual source of enjoyment. Your view
of the solar system is bounded by Uranus, and the laws of this planet
form the ultimatum of your mathematical results; but these beings catch a
sight of planets belonging to another system and even reason on the
phenomena presented by another sun. Those comets, of which your
astronomical history is so imperfect, are to them perfectly familiar, and
in their ephemerides their places are shown with as much accurateness as
those of Jupiter or Venus in your almanacks; the parallax of the fixed
stars nearest them is as well understood as that of their own sun, and
they possess a magnificent history of the changes taking place in the
heavens and which are governed by laws that it would be vain for me to
attempt to give you an idea of. They are acquainted with the revolutions
and uses of comets; they understand the system of those meteoric
formations of stones which have so much as