have histories in which the gradual changes of nebulas in their progress towards systems have been registered, so that they can predict their future changes.  And their astronomical records are not like yours which go back only twenty centuries to the time of Hipparchus; they embrace a period a hundred times as long, and their civil history for the same time is as correct as their astronomical one.  As I cannot describe to you the organs of these wonderful beings, so neither can I show to you their modes of life; but as their highest pleasures depend upon intellectual pursuits, so you may conclude that those modes of life bear the strictest analogy to that which on the earth you would call exalted virtue.  I will tell you however that they have no wars, and that the objects of their ambition are entirely those of intellectual greatness, and that the only passion that they feel in which comparisons with each other can be instituted are those dependent upon a love of glory of the purest kind.  If I were to show you the different parts of the surface of this planet, you would see marvellous results of the powers possessed by these highly intellectual beings and of the wonderful manner in which they have applied and modified matter.  Those columnar masses, which seem to you as if arising out of a mass of ice below, are results of art, and processes are going on in them connected with the formation and perfection of their food.  The brilliant coloured fluids are the results of such operations as on the earth would be performed in your laboratories, or more properly in your refined culinary apparatus, for they are connected with their system of nourishment.  Those opaque azure clouds, to which you saw a few minutes ago one of those beings directing his course, are works of art and places in which they move through different regions of their atmosphere and command the temperature and the quantity of light most fitted for their philosophical researches, or most convenient for the purposes of life.  On the verge of the visible horizon which we perceive around us, you may see in the east a very dark spot or shadow, in which the light of the sun seems entirely absorbed; this is the border of an immense mass of liquid analogous to your ocean, but unlike your sea it is inhabited by a race of intellectual beings inferior indeed to those belonging to the atmosphere of Saturn, but yet possessed of an extensive range of sensations and endowed with extraordinary power and intelligence.  I could transport you to the different planets and show you in each peculiar intellectual beings bearing analogies to each other, but yet all different in power and essence.  In Jupiter you would see creatures similar to those in Saturn, but with different powers of locomotion; in Mars and Venus you would find races of created forms more analogous to those belonging to the earth; but in every part of the planetary system you would find one character peculiar to all intelligent natures, a sense of receiving