“It will doubtless seem incredible, perhaps almost miraculous, to you at this stage of mundane development, when I tell you that I was not born and reared on _this planet_. But let not this deter you. Events that seem incredible, incomprehensible and impossible in one age, often become credible, comprehensible and possible in a succeeding age. To a savage it seems impossible to project a 2,000-pound cannon ball as far as you actually do project it. To the contemporaries of Columbus, our modern steamer, which crosses the Atlantic in about five days, seemed no doubt incredible. Telegraphy seemed impossible to Washington and his contemporaries; so did a sixty-mile-an-hour train. But _we_ all find them perfectly natural and practicable in this age. We have divested them of all mystery, and have put them under the dominion of an inexorable law, whose operation our ancestors did not understand. It would be highly presumptuous on our part to assume that we know all what can be known: that all what seems to be impossible to us now must forever remain impossible to our posterity. “You, no doubt, are all familiar with Mr. Spencer’s maxim, ‘Not directly, but by successive approximations do mankind arrive at correct conclusions.’ “I fear that I shall be taxing your credulity severely by giving you my truthful history, but, with the foregoing facts in our minds, it may be worth while to listen to the claims of any person who does not enter wholly into the field of inconceivability. History proves that the persons who have been willing to listen fairly to the claims of others, even if they appeared impossible at the time, keeping what they believed to be good and rejecting what they believe to be wrong, have by far been the noblest and the most useful to mankind; to them is due the progress of the world.” “All that you have said is true,” said Mr. Uwins, “and I am sure we can not fail to give you the most interesting hearing.” “I was born on the planet Mars, about fifty years ago,” continued Mr. Midith. “Born on the planet Mars!” I exclaimed with astonishment. “You have, indeed, a strange history, then.” “From astronomical studies,” continued Mr. Midith, “you have learned that a Marsian day is about 38 minutes longer than your day here on earth. The Marsian year is 687 of your days instead of 365-1/4 days. The diameter of Mars is about 5,000 miles, while that of the earth is nearly 8,000 miles. The heat and light of Mars is, of course, not so intense as that of the earth, because Mars is about 34 million miles farther from the sun than the earth; and because heat and light decrease in intensity as the square of the distance increases.