This is, in fact, the case. I have much- very much
which it would give me the greatest pleasure to communicate. I have
much to say of the climate of the planet; of its wonderful
alternations of heat and cold, of unmitigated and burning sunshine for
one fortnight, and more than polar frigidity for the next; of a
constant transfer of moisture, by distillation like that in vacuo,
from the point beneath the sun to the point the farthest from it; of a
variable zone of running water, of the people themselves; of their
manners, customs, and political institutions; of their peculiar
physical construction; of their ugliness; of their want of ears, those
useless appendages in an atmosphere so peculiarly modified; of their
consequent ignorance of the use and properties of speech; of their
substitute for speech in a singular method of inter-communication;
of the incomprehensible connection between each particular
individual in the moon with some particular individual on the
earth- a connection analogous with, and depending upon, that of the
orbs of the planet and the satellites, and by means of which the lives
and destinies of the inhabitants of the one are interwoven with the
lives and destinies of the inhabitants of the other; and above all, if
it so please your Excellencies- above all, of those dark and hideous
mysteries which lie in the outer regions of the moon- regions which,
owing to the almost miraculous accordance of the satellite's
rotation on its own axis with its sidereal revolution about the earth,
have never yet been turned, and, by God's mercy, never shall be
turned, to the scrutiny of the telescopes of man.
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