A contemporary of the two authors we have just mentioned is the Nestor of French writers, Fontenelle, who lived from 1657 to 1757, exactly a century. He described with much detail the inhabitants of the planets, and, like Huygens, he starts from the basis that they are all inhabited, and inhabited by beings formed according to the circumstances. On Mercury, according to him, the heat is so great that the rivers contain fused metals instead of water, particularly gold and silver; the inhabitants of this planet can therefore not imagine that there are worlds like the Earth, where gold and silver are solid and serve as money. Besides, the inhabitants of Mercury could not support the excessive heat if their planet was not animated by a movement of rotation so rapid that they are only exposed for a short time to the rays of the Sun. They are all inclined to be hot-heads and, like fools and infants, live without reflection and enjoy themselves in anticipation of the coolness of the night. Littrow remarks on this subject that Bode, the translator of Fontenelle and at one time Director of the Berlin Observatory, is seriously astonished by this opinion of Fontenelle and exclaims: “Very strange! for with us in Berlin we find that a great heat makes people lazy and sleepy instead of lively and active.” The inhabitants of Venus only render homage to the goddess of love. They are not interested in philosophy or mathematics, read no books or journals, pass the whole day in their flirtations, and practise in a superior manner the arts which appertain to them, music, poetry, dance, etc., but they are not adept at cookery, for they live almost entirely on air. They are not beautiful, but their amorous character prevents them being influenced by their ugliness; they are Celadons and Sylvanders. Wieland certainly did not know the works of Fontenelle, or he would probably have located one of his romances or his love-stories on Venus as depicted by that author. Fontenelle’s procedure with regard to Mars is rather singular. He declares that that planet does not merit any attention. Our imaginative savant hardly wants to say anything about Jupiter either. He gives a description of the aspect offered by the whole solar system as seen from that planet. He explains how Venus and Mercury are invisible there without the aid of a telescope, and that the Earth only appears as a point. The volume of Jupiter causes him some embarrassment, for whereas the inhabitants of Mercury on account of the small dimensions of that planet nearly all know each other, those of Jupiter cannot possibly do so.