It is not impossible that relative nearness to the sun may be an advantage to Venus from the biologic point of view.  She gets less than one third as much heat as Mercury receives on the average, and she gets it with almost absolute uniformity.  At aphelion Mercury is about two and four tenths times hotter than Venus; then it rushes sunward, and within forty-four days becomes six times hotter than Venus.  In the meantime the temperature of the latter, while high as compared with the earth’s, remains practically unchanged.  Not only may Mercury’s temperature reach the destructive point, and thus be too high for organic life, but Mercury gets nothing with either moderation or constancy.  It is a world both of excessive heat and of violent contrasts of temperature.  Venus, on the other hand, presents an unparalleled instance of invariableness and uniformity.  She may well be called the favorite of the sun, and, through the advantages of her situation, may be stimulated by him to more intense vitality than falls to the lot of the earth.

It is open, at least to the writers of the interplanetary romances now so popular, to imagine that on Venus, life, while encompassed with the serenity that results from the circular form of her orbit, and the unchangeableness of her climates, is richer, warmer, more passionate, more exquisite in its forms and more fascinating in its experiences, keener of sense, capable of more delicious joys, than is possible to it amid the manifold inclemencies of the colder earth.

We have seen that there is excellent authority for saying that Venus’s atmosphere is from one and a half to two times as dense and as extensive as ours.  Here is an interesting suggestion of aerial possibilities for her inhabitants.  If man could but fly, how would he take to himself wings and widen his horizons along with the birds!  Give him an atmosphere the double in density of that which now envelopes him, take off a little of his weight, thereby increasing the ratio of his strength and activity, put into his nervous system a more puissant stimulus from the life-giving sun, and perchance he would fly.

Well, on Venus, apparently, these very conditions actually exist.  How, then, do intellectual creatures in the world of Venus take wing when they choose?  Upon what spectacle of fluttering pinions afloat in iridescent air, like a Raphael dream of heaven and its angels, might we not look down if we could get near enough to our brilliant evening star to behold the intimate splendors of its life?

As Venus herself would be the most brilliant member of the celestial host to an observer stationed on the night side of Mercury, so the earth takes precedence in the midnight sky of Venus.  For the inhabitants of Venus Mercury is a splendid evening and morning star only, while the earth, being an outer planet, is visible at times in that part of the sky which is directly opposite to the place of the sun.  The light reflected from our planet is probably less