the same side to her luminary.  All that we heard from the natives tended to confirm this view.  They told us that far away to the east and west of Womla there was a desert land, covered with snow and ice, on which the sun never shone.  We also gathered that the sun rises to a greater and lesser height above the cliffs alternately, thus producing a succession of warmer and cooler seasons; a fact which agrees with Schiaparelli’s observation that the axis of the planet sways to and from the sun.  Gazen was intensely delighted at this discovery, partly for its own sake, but mainly, I think, because it would afford him an opportunity of crushing the celebrated Pettifer Possil, his professional antagonist, who, it seems, is bitterly opposed to the doctrines of Schiaparelli.  But why did the sun rise and set every fifteen hours or thereabout, and so make what I have called a “day” and “night”?  Why did he not continue in the same spot, except for the slow change caused by the nutation or nodding of Venus?  Gazen was much perplexed over this anomaly, and sought an explanation of it in the refraction of the atmosphere above the cliffs producing an apparent but not a real motion of the orb.

The territory of Womla may be divided into three zones, namely, a central plain under cultivation, a belt of undulating hills, kept as a park or pleasaunce, and a magnificent, nay, a sublime wilderness, next to the crater wall.

The natural wealth of the country is very great.  Some of its productions resemble and others are different from those of the earth.  We saw gold, silver, copper, tin, and iron, as well as metals which were quite new to us.  Some of these had a purple, blue, or green colour, and emitted a most agreeable fragrance.  There are granites and porphyries, marbles and petrifactions of the most exquisite grain or tints.  Precious stones like the diamond, ruby, sapphire, topaz, emerald, garnet, opal, turquoise, and others familiar or unfamiliar to us, fairly abound, and can be picked up on the shores of the lake.  I presume that many of them have been formed on a large scale in chasms of the rock by the volcanic fumes of the crater.

What struck us most of all, however, was the prevalence of phosphorescent minerals which absorbed the sunlight by day, and glimmered feebly in the dusk.  Professor Gazen seems to think that the presence of snow and clouds, together with these phosphorescent bodies, may help to account for the mysterious luminosity on the dark side of Venus.

The vegetation is wonderfully rich, varied, and luxuriant.  As a rule, the foliage is thick and glossy; but while it is green to blackness in some of the trees, it is parti-coloured or iridescent in others.  Many of the flowers, too, are iridescent, or change their hues from hour to hour.  The beauty and profusion of the flowers is beyond conception, and some of the loveliest grow on what I should take for palms, ferns, canes, and grasses.  A distant forest or woodland rivals the splendid plumage of some tropical bird.  We heard of “singing flowers,” including a water-lily which bursts open with a musical note, and of many plants which are sensitive to heat as well as touch, and if Gazen be correct, to electricity and magnetism.  We saw one in a house which was said to require a change of scene from time to time else it would languish and die.