Such being the physical condition of the planet, it happened that, in the year B.C. 18,270, just twenty thousand years ago, there suddenly appeared, uniformly dispersed over the forty million square miles of the northern hemisphere, exactly one hundred millions of rational creatures in the likeness of the human race. This is an ultimate fact which has hitherto baffled all inquiry. The manifestation took place suddenly and simultaneously; but whether it was the result of a new creation, or of a translation from other regions of space, is wrapped in impenetrable mystery. For twenty thousand years the Unknown Power which called them into being has preserved a rigid and unbroken silence. All that is known is that at the above epoch one hundred millions of highly intelligent creatures, equally divided between the two sexes, male and female, simultaneously awoke into conscious life. Though thus strictly contemporaneous in origin, they were nevertheless, so far as appearance indicated, of very different ages. They all seemed to be adults, but their aspects varied between that of an adult of twenty and one of sixty years of age. It is not my intention to describe the long and complicated process by which these detached creations, all alike ignorant of what had taken place, were, in the long course of ages, gradually amalgamated into communities and states. This would form the subject of a separate work on the ancient history of Hesperos, for which I possess copious materials. [I fear lost.] I must here confine myself to setting out more in detail the extraordinary differences, as to their circumstances and conditions of life, which exist between the rational inhabitants of Hesperos and those of the earth. The first fact which will strike the reader as a very extraordinary difference indeed is this—that, although there is the same distinction of sexes as is found on earth, and although there is just the same mutual attraction between them, there is no such thing as reproduction of the species. To counterbalance this strange fact, however, there are no such things, at least as the result of natural causes, as disease, decay, and death. When I said that the apparent ages of the new created or imported Hesperians varied between twenty and sixty years, I did not mean to intimate, and the reader is not to infer, that anything in the slightest degree resembling the horrible condition of the Struldbrugs of Luggnagg has place in Hesperos. Far from it; the dependence of the bodily organism on the age of the individual in that planet has no analogy with the progressive decay of the wretched Struldbrug; it follows a more complicated law.