r moment to ascertain
their meaning."

And taking up the paper again, he said, "Perhaps we might analyze it
word by word, and from its detached parts gather some clue to its sense
as a whole."

"What can be the meaning of all that cluster of interrogations after
Gallia?" asked Servadac.

Lieutenant Procope, who had hitherto not spoken, now broke his silence
by saying, "I beg, gentlemen, to submit my opinion that this document
goes very far to confirm my hypothesis that a fragment of the earth has
been precipitated into space."

Captain Servadac hesitated, and then replied, "Even if it does, I do not
see how it accounts in the least for the geological character of the new
asteroid."

"But will you allow me for one minute to take my supposition for
granted?" said Procope. "If a new little planet has been formed, as I
imagine, by disintegration from the old, I should conjecture that Gallia
is the name assigned to it by the writer of this paper. The very notes
of interrogation are significant that he was in doubt what he should
write."

"You would presume that he was a Frenchman?" asked the count.

"I should think so," replied the lieutenant.

"Not much doubt about that," said Servadac; "it is all in French,
except a few scattered words of English, Latin, and Italian, inserted to
attract attention. He could not tell into whose hands the message would
fall first."

"Well, then," said Count Timascheff, "we seem to have found a name for
the new world we occupy."

"But what I was going especially to observe," continued the lieutenant,
"is that the distance, 59,000,000 leagues, represents precisely the
distance we ourselves were from the sun on the 15th. It was on that day
we crossed the orbit of Mars."

"Yes, true," assented the others.

"And the next line," said the lieutenant, after reading it aloud,
"apparently registers the distance traversed by Gallia, the new little
planet, in her own orbit. Her speed, of course, we know by Kepler's
laws, would vary according to her distance from the sun, and if she
were--as I conjecture from the temperature at that date--on the 15th of
January at her perihelion, she would be traveling twice as fast as the
earth, which moves at the rate of between 50,000 and 60,000 miles an
hour."

"You think, then," said Servadac, with a smile, "you have determined
the perihelion of our orbit; but how about the aphelion? Can you form a
judgment as to what distance we are likely to be c