“The results are often reproduced to the Martians in lectures, bulletins, or in sections of the great newspaper Dia.

“The young men approached us as we entered the room, and after saluting my guide and also Chapman with the Martian cry, Tintotita, led me to a chair, and giving me one of the black wafers, whose acidity had a short time before so vigorously renewed my consciousness, began their inquiry.

“The photograph of each visitor is taken, and a process quite like our collodion or wet process is used.  The portraits are more permanent than with the perishable dry plates.  It is a curious thing to learn that for 100 years these records and pictures have been taken, and that there are on Mars hosts of unidentified spirits, who entered its wondrous precincts before that time.

“The duration of life in Mars is very various.  There seems here an undiscovered law, and a group of observers in Mars are to-day trying to penetrate this mystery.  It is asserted that there is evidence that Egyptians of the ante-Christian epoch are to-day living in Mars, but their identification is now almost impossible.  On the other hand, it is a fact ascertained and recorded that in one hundred years many Martians die, while others scarcely survive the ordinary limit of our human life on earth.  This gives a great interest to Martian society.  Here for ages have possibly flown disembodied spirits from our earth; in their reincarnation they have assumed the features and faculties of youth; they have also, under changed conditions of life, and moderated functions and activity in living, been physically, perhaps mentally, modified.  Their own memory of their past on Earth, however vivid, and then in exceptional beings, has slowly disappeared or left only vague cloud-like waverings and congeries of reminiscences.

“So that great human souls that have entered Mars in the early centuries of our earth’s historic periods may be living here almost unrecognized.  They have drifted into occupations suitable to their genius in some of the many great cities, and no vestige of their past remains.  The system of the Registeries is scarcely a century old, and while now from the marvellous industry and persistence of the investigators, the great ones of the neighboring worlds, and even the most obscure are in some cognizable way identified, yet from the long ages before that there is almost no authentic registration.

“This is more to be regretted as the law of life on the planet might then be better formulated.  Essentially it seems necessary for existence here to be in unison with the conditions; contentment means longevity.  Of course, the remarkable men and women I saw at the Patenta were all well known.  They had made themselves known, and not only were their earthly names and lives put down on the pages of the Registers, but all their knowledge had been as inquisitively and scrupulously impressed.  Nor is this all.  From many worlds and earths there is flowing constantly to this planet new, strange, wonderful beings.  Here is a cosmos of races, tastes, nationalities, destinies, civilizations, and instincts, from whose amalgamated and fused vortices of tendency this marvellous life has been formed.