vessel, which was about six hundred tons burden.  Thus, instead of riding upon horses, as we do in this world, the inhabitants of the moon (for we now found we were in Madam Luna) fly about on these birds.  The king, we found, was engaged in a war with the sun, and he offered me a commission, but I declined the honor his majesty intended me.  Everything in this world is of extraordinary magnitude! a common flea being much larger than one of our sheep:  in making war their principal weapons are radishes, which are used as darts:  those who are wounded by them die immediately.  Their shields are made of mushrooms, and their darts (when radishes are out of season) of the tops of asparagus.  Some of the natives of the dog-star are to be seen here; commerce tempts them to ramble; and their faces are like large mastiffs’, with their eyes near the lower end or tip of their noses:  they have no eyelids, but cover their eyes with the end of their tongues when they go to sleep; they are generally twenty feet high.  As to the natives of the moon; none of them are less in stature than thirty-six feet:  they are not called the human species, but the cooking animals, for they all dress their food by fire, as we do, but lose no time at their meals, as they open their left side, and place the whole quantity at once in their stomach, then shut it again till the same day in the next month; for they never indulge themselves with food more than twelve times a year, or once a month.  All but gluttons and epicures must prefer this method to ours.

There is but one sex either of the cooking or any other animals in the moon; they are all produced from trees of various sizes and foliage; that which produces the cooking animal, or human species, is much more beautiful than any of the others; it has large, straight boughs and flesh-colored leaves, and the fruit it produces are nuts or pods, with hard shells, at least two yards long; when they become ripe, which is known from their changing color, they are gathered with great care, and laid by as long as they think proper; when they choose to animate the seed of these nuts, they throw them into a large cauldron of boiling water, which opens the shells in a few hours, and out jumps the creature.

Nature forms their minds for different pursuits before they come into the world; from one shell comes forth a warrior, from another a philosopher, from a third a divine, from a fourth a lawyer, from a fifth a farmer, from a sixth a clown, etc., etc., and all of them immediately begin to perfect themselves by practicing what they before knew only in theory.