“Now we all know--this is the way the story runs--that the moon was once inhabited by a highly intelligent race. They tell us it is a cold, dead world now, not at all fit for inhabitants. But that is because its day is passed. Being so much smaller than the earth it cooled off quicker, and its life-bearing period long since found its end. Men have often speculated on the idea that our race will one day fail and the time come when the last generation shall pass away and leave the earth a bare and ugly thing, to continue yet longer its lonely, weary journey around a failing sun. That day the moon has seen. That direful fate the race of moon men have experienced. Some poor being, the last of his kind, was left sole monarch of a dying world, and with the moon all before him where to choose, chose rather to die with the rest and leave his world to cold and darkness. “From our own experience we do not know how high a state of civilization can be reached by giving a race all the time that is needed. But we know that before the inhabitants of the moon passed off the stage they had attained to the highest possible degree of intelligence. They began existence at a very low plane, developed gradually through long periods of time--there has never been any haste in these matters--and when they had reached their maturity as a race of intellectual and moral beings, primitive man was just beginning on the vast undertaking of subduing the earth, a task not yet accomplished. “The incident I propose to relate occurred in antediluvian times, when there were giants in the earth who lived a thousand years. Then matter reigned, not mind. It was the age of brawn. Everything material existed on a gigantic scale, and man’s architectural works, rude in design but well adapted for shelter and protection, were proportioned to his own stature and rivaled the everlasting hills in size and solidity. And they needed something substantial for protection, for war was their business and their pass time. They lived for nothing but to fight. It was brother against brother, neighbor against neighbor, tribe against tribe; and the man who could not fight, and fight hard, had no excuse for living. War was not an art, but a natural outburst of brutal instincts. A giant glories in his strength and cultivates it as naturally as a bird its song. But it is pleasant to consider the fact that as man’s mental and moral qualities have developed his body has become smaller. As the necessity for that immense physical strength gradually passed away, nature, abhorring such unnecessary waste of material, applied to us her inexorable laws whereby a thing or a state of things no longer useful slowly fades away, and our bodies accommodated themselves to new conditions.