ld not see the "Man
in the Moon," whose grinning face had so often looked down upon me, but
from my first point of observation everything looked as if life had
never existed there and, consequently, I was about to conclude that no
human beings inhabit the Moon. This theory soon vanished, for after I
had traveled over a hundred miles I came to a thriving center of
population, the largest city on the sphere, inhabited by more than sixty
thousand rational beings.

These creatures resemble us most strongly in their mental capacities,
though their bodies are out of harmony with ours, having three eyes and
no nose. The third eye is situated in the center of the forehead, and
the other two more toward the sides of the head.

Life is not sustained by breathing a gaseous air as we do, so that the
sense of smell is performed by the protruded upper lip. At the voluntary
effort to catch scent the upper lip noticeably rolls upward into a
partial scroll.

I was anxious to learn how the life of these Moonites is sustained
without breathing and, to my astonishment, I learned that they eat solid
air at intervals of about six hours. This is not taken in connection
with the regular food, but is eaten alone and carried into a separate
stomach wherein it is disintegrated by the chemical action of the
stomachic acids. The gases thus formed serve the same purpose as the air
we breathe into our lungs.

According to the conjectures of some earthly astronomers I was expecting
to see a race of immense giants. On the contrary, I found that these
Moonites grow to only about one-fourth our height, but possess fully
three-fourths as much circumference of body. Notwithstanding that they
are so short and rotund, they are healthy and exceedingly quick in all
their bodily movements.

No doubt I shall be chided for saying that these Moon-inhabitants are a
handsome people, but I was enabled to judge them by a universal standard
of beauty, and I looked upon them as a product of the same infinite
Creator who fashioned our mortal bodies with such marvelous adaptation
of means to end.

One thing is sure, were a person from the Moon to set foot upon our
planet, he would estimate us to be as far out of harmony with his
standards of beauty as we should consider him to be out of harmony with
ours.

As might be expected, these people are very peculiar in their habits.
There is a small percentage of the population who are bright stars
intellectually, while