As we have seen above in the chapter on Mars, one often notices besides the luminous points we have mentioned certain more extensive brilliant projections which appear on the terminator and which must be caused by the reflection of the rising or setting sun on snowy peaks or on clouds which are certainly not signals. However this may be, of all the bodies which blaze in the skies on a clear night, and particularly of all those bodies which gravitate with us round the Sun, there is one which engages with a captivating interest the attention of astronomers. It is the singular little world of Mars. But it is not so easy to communicate with it as was supposed by that good lady of Pau, Madame Guzman, who left a legacy to the Académie des Sciences in the shape of a prize of 100,000 francs to be given to the first person who should discover a means of communicating between the Earth and another world--with the exception of the planet Mars, because it would be too easy! So true it is that on our planet the best intentions are often mixed up with a few grains of folly. After steam, the electric light and the telegraph and the telephone, the discovery of unmistakable signs of the existence of humanity inhabiting another region of our solar archipelago, would that not be the most marvellous apotheosis of the scientific glory of the twentieth century? And cannot wireless telegraphy be some day applied to this problem? Electro-magnetism is an immense invisible world still insufficiently explored. Let us wait, observe, and study. IX. STARS AND ATOMS CHAPTER IX STARS AND ATOMS LAST night in the calm silence of midnight, while all nature slept, I observed in the telescope a small fixed star lost in the multitude of the heavenly host, a pale star of the seventh magnitude separated from us by an almost immeasurable distance. In my thoughts I travelled up to it. I remembered that this star is not visible to the naked eye; that there are 19 stars of the first magnitude, 60 of the second, 182 of the third, 530 of the fourth, 1,600 of the fifth, and 4,800 of the sixth magnitude (which gives a total of about 7,000 stars visible to the naked eye in the case of persons gifted with acute vision); bub that the stars of the seventh magnitude, one of which I was observing, are 13,000 in number, and those of the eighth magnitude 40,000; that the number grows progressively as we ascend beyond natural vision. I remember that the sum of the stars of the first ten magnitudes amounts to 560,000, that of the first twelve magnitudes to 4 million, and that we reach more than 40 millions in taking the first fifteen magnitudes.