Inhabitants of Venus must have a glorious view of the earth, with her attendant moon. For just at the time when the two planets are nearest together, and when she is only “new Venus” to us, a dark and invisible body, the earth is “full earth” to Venus. The very best sight we ever have of Venus can not come near that sight. But if Mercury and Venus really are so often covered with heavy clouds as astronomers believe, this must greatly interfere with any habits of star-gazing. Venus and the earth have often been called twin-sister planets. There are many points of likeness between them. In size they differ little, and in length of day they are within an hour of being the same. Earth certainly has a companion-moon, and Venus, it is believed, has not. At one time several astronomers were pretty certain that they had caught glimpses of a moon; but the supposed moon has of late quite vanished, and nobody can say whether it ever really existed. Venus travels in an ellipse which comes nearer to being a circle than the orbit of any other planet. Mountain-shadows have been watched through the telescope, in Venus, as in the moon. Some astronomers have believed that they saw signs of very lofty mountains--as much as twenty-eight miles, or four times the height of our highest earthly mountains, but this requires confirmation. There is a good deal of uncertainty about the climate of Venus. The heat there must greatly surpass heat ever felt on earth--the sun being about double the apparent size of our sun, and pouring out nearly double the amount of light and heat that we receive. This difference may be met, as already stated, by a sheltering, cloudy atmosphere, or the inhabitants may have frames and eyesight suited to the increased glare and warmth. An atmosphere and water exist there as here. From what we have seen above of the rapid and violent seasons of this planet, we might think that the agitations of the winds, the rains, and the storms would surpass everything which we see and experience here, and that its atmosphere and its seas would be subject to a continual evaporation and precipitation in torrential rains--an hypothesis confirmed by its light, due, doubtless, to reflection from its upper clouds, and to the multiplicity of the clouds themselves. To judge by our own impressions, we should be much less pleased with this country than with our own, and it is even very probable that our physical organization, accommodating and complaisant as it is, could not become acclimatized to such variations of temperature. But it is not necessary to conclude from this that Venus is uninhabitable and uninhabited. We may even suppose, without exaggeration, that its inhabitants, organized to live in the midst of these conditions, find themselves at their ease, like a fish in water, and think that our earth is too monotonous and too cold to serve as an abode for active and intelligent beings.