This reasoning as just stated for the Sun may be applied to the other stars. We know that on the surface of Jupiter the intensity of weight is twice and a third times as great as here, while on Mars it only equals 37⁄100.
On the surface of Mercury, weight is nearly twice as small again as here. On Neptune it is approximately equal to our own.
With deference to the Selenites, everything is at its lightest on the Moon: a man weighing 70 kilograms on the Earth would not weigh more than 12 kilos there.
So all tastes can be provided for: the only thing to be regretted is that one can not choose one's planet with the same facility as one's residence upon the Earth.
CHAPTER XII
LIFE, UNIVERSAL AND ETERNAL
And now, while thanking my readers for having followed me so far in this descriptive account of the marvels of the Cosmos, I must inquire what philosophical impression has been produced on their minds by these celestial excursions to the other worlds? Are you left indifferent to the pageant of the Heavens? When your imagination was borne away to these distant stars, suns of the infinite, these innumerable stellar systems disseminated through a boundless eternity, did you ask what existed there, what purpose was served by those dazzling spheres, what effects resulted from these forces, radiations, energies? Did you reflect that the elements which upon our little Earth determined a vital activity so prodigious and so varied must needs have spread the waves of an incomparably vaster and more diversified existence throughout the immensities of the Universe? Have you felt that all can not be dead and deserted, as we are tempted by the illusions of our terrestrial senses and of our isolation to believe in the silence of the night: that on the contrary, the real aim of Astronomy, instead of ending with statements of the positions and movements of the stars, is to enable us to penetrate to them, to make us divine, and know, and appreciate their physical constitution, their degree of life and intellectuality in the universal order?
On the Earth, it is Life and Thought that flourish; and it is Life and Thought that we seek again in these starry constellations strewn to Infinitude amid the immeasurable fields of Heaven.