gue as follows:

Since a body placed upon the surface of the Sun is 108 times farther
from its center than it is upon a globe of the dimensions of the Earth,
and since, on the other hand, attraction diminishes with the square of
the distance, the intensity of the weight would there be 108 multiplied
by 108, or 11,700 times weaker. Now divide the number representing the
mass, _i.e._, 324,000, by this number 11,700, and it results that bodies
at the surface of the Sun are 28 times heavier than here. A woman whose
weight was 60 kilos would weigh 1,680 kilograms there if organized in
the same way as on the Earth, and would find walking very difficult, for
at each step she would lift up a shoe that weighed at least ten
kilograms.

This reasoning as just stated for the Sun may be applied to the other
stars. We know that on the surface of Jupiter the intensity of weight is
twice and a third times as great as here, while on Mars it only equals
37/100.

On the surface of Mercury, weight is nearly twice as small again as
here. On Neptune it is approximately equal to our own.

With deference to the Selenites, everything is at its lightest on the
Moon: a man weighing 70 kilograms on the Earth would not weigh more than
12 kilos there.

So all tastes can be provided for: the only thing to be regretted is
that one can not choose one's planet with the same facility as one's
residence upon the Earth.

CHAPTER XII

LIFE, UNIVERSAL AND ETERNAL

And now, while thanking my readers for having followed me so far in this
descriptive account of the marvels of the Cosmos, I must inquire what
philosophical impression has been produced on their minds by these
celestial excursions to the other worlds? Are you left indifferent to
the pageant of the Heavens? When your imagination was borne away to
these distant stars, suns of the infinite, these innumerable stellar
systems disseminated through a boundless eternity, did you ask what
existed there, what purpose was served by those dazzling spheres, what
effects resulted from these forces, radiations, energies? Did you
reflect that the elements which upon our little Earth determined a vital
activity so prodigious and so varied must needs have spread the waves of
an incomparably vaster and more diversified existence throughout the
immensities of the Universe? Have you felt that all can not be dead and
deserted, as we are tempted by the illusions of our terrestrial senses
and of our iso