The Lunarian Professor and His Remarkable Revelations Concerning the Earth, the Moon and Mars: Together with An Account of the Cruise of the Sally AnnAlexander, James B. (James Bradun)
Science
The Lunarian Professor and His Remarkable Revelations Concerning the Earth, the Moon and Mars: Together with An Account of the Cruise of the Sally Ann
Alexander, James B. (James Bradun)
Human-alien encounters -- Fiction; Life on other planets -- Fiction; Utopias -- Fiction
The reader will please remember that this visit and revelation of the
Lunarian Professor took place in 1892, seventeen years ago, and some of
the predictions are already due of fulfillment or of apparent progress
in that direction. For example he gives Minneapolis a population of
1,780,000 in the year 1925 only sixteen years from the present. This is
worse than Walton. But I do not feel at liberty to alter the Professional
utterances. If I should begin to do this I would never know where to
stop. There will doubtless be found other predictions at variance with
our ideas, especially as to the time in which the fulfillment should
take place. Time is the most uncertain element concerned in prophetic
utterances. Give a prophet time enough and he will successfully predict
you anything you like. “All things come to him who _waits_.” But I have
not the assurance to change anything the Professor has said and I am not
prepared to aver that the truths as they appear to common mundane mortals
are to be preferred to the errors however manifest of so illustrious a
prophet—just as we accept the dicta of Moses or St. Paul—when we are
entirely sure they do not know what they are talking about. Our Professor
is probably wrong in regard to the settlement of some of the questions
taken up by him, but to tell the honest truth, I am too ignorant of the
disputed points to contradict him. If he says black is white it is safer
for me not to talk back. But when it comes to plain statements of facts,
concerning the present conditions on the Moon and Mars, in which, from
the abundance of personal knowledge there remains no license to draw upon
his imagination for his facts, I implicitly trust the Professor. I never
saw a pair of eyes so full of honesty for their size, or of as large
capacity for honesty as his. Even there, however, some of his statements
are liable to be contradicted. For example, the theory of the hump or
protuberance on the hither side of the Moon, which had some currency
among our astronomers 40 or 50 years ago appears later to have been
abandoned by at least some of them, but we should not allow mere theory
to counter-balance the testimony of a competent eye witness.
It may seem strange that the Professor has made almost no mention of the
great Japanese-Russian war. But as this war settled nothing, did not
even settle what there was to be settled it may be considered as a mere
incident in the discussion of the real question at issue. This is only my
conjecture of the reason of his silence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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