"Yes; and quite recently your telescopes have noticed one along the shores of a sea to which your colleagues have given a name which will always be dear to me, even when far from the Earth. The greater part of our shores are beaches, level plains. We have few mountains, and our seas are not deep. The inhabitants make use of these overflows for irrigating great stretches of country. They have straightened and enlarged the watercourses and made them like canals, and have constructed a network of immense canals all over the continents. The continents themselves are not bristling all over with Alpine or Himalayan upheavals like those of the terrestrial globe, but are _immense plains_, crossed in all directions by canals, which connect all the seas with one another, and by streams made to resemble canals. Formerly there was as much water on Mars, in proportion to the size of the planet, as on the Earth; gradually, from age to age, a part of the rain-water sank into the depths of the soil and did not return to the surface. It combined itself chemically with the rocks, and was withdrawn from atmospheric circulation. Then, too, from age to age, rains, snows, and winds, winter frosts and summer droughts, have disintegrated the mountains, and the watercourses, bringing fragments to the sea-basins, have gradually raised their beds. We have no more large oceans or deep seas,--nothing but inland waters; many straits, gulfs, and seas analogous to the Channel, the Red Sea, the Adriatic, the Baltic, and the Caspian; pleasant shores, quiet harbors, large lakes and streams, aerial rather than aquatic fleets, an almost always clear sky, especially in the morning. There are no mornings on Earth so luminous as ours. "The meteorological system differs materially from that of the Earth, because, the atmosphere being more rarified, the waters which move over the surface evaporate more easily, and then because in condensing again, instead of forming clouds that last, they pass almost without transition from the gaseous to the liquid state. There are few clouds and few fogs. "Astronomy is cultivated there on account of the clearness of the heavens. We have two satellites, whose courses would appear strange to earthly astronomers, for while one of them gives us months of a hundred and thirty hours, or five Martial days, plus eight hours, the other, by a combination of its motion with the daily rotation of the planet, rises in the occident and sets in the orient, crossing the sky from west to east in five hours and a half, and passing from one phase to the other in less than three hours. That spectacle is unique in the whole solar system, and has done much to attract the attention of the inhabitants to the study of the sky. Besides that, we have eclipses of the moon almost every day, but never total eclipses of the Sun, because our satellites are too small.