what your feelings are,” said the Genius; “you want analogies and all the elements of knowledge to comprehend the scene before you.  You are in the same state in which a fly would be whose microscopic eye was changed for one similar to that of man; and you are wholly unable to associate what you now see with your former knowledge.  But those beings who are before you, and who appear to you almost as imperfect in their functions as the zoophytes of the Polar Sea, to which they are not unlike in their apparent organisation to your eyes, 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 astonished you on earth; and they