The Lunarian Professor and His Remarkable Revelations Concerning the Earth, the Moon and Mars / Together with An Account of the Cruise of the Sally Ann

by James B. Alexander

“The control of the reproduction of the population has been in the hands of the state from the remotest antiquity,” said he; “and no increase in the total number has ever been permitted unless there had already been an increase in the means of supporting the population by the discovery of improved methods or new appliances. The tendency and policy has always been to allow the population to keep up near the limits of the means of support, and occasionally it has crowded a little too close. Then there are occasional losses by fire and a more or less steady unavoidable waste of food materials in their ordinary handling. Some are lost in the sea. But as long as there is a store of mineral coal to draw upon, no such losses can entail more than a temporary inconvenience. One thing that has a considerable effect on the food supply, is the change in fashions, that often takes place in a manner that the authorities cannot foresee or provide for.”

“Then fashion holds sway in the moon as well as the earth! Well, I am surprised! But as your clothes appear to grow on you I don’t see how fashion can interfere very much, or how it could affect the question of food.”

“Fashion with us has nothing to do with dress. As you say, nature has provided us with a dress at once suitable and beautiful. Whatever faults we have, personal vanity is not among them. Our attention is but little absorbed in ourselves, but is constantly directed to others and to the service of the community. If anyone should betake himself to personal frills and ornaments, I fancy he would be told he was getting like the Earthlings, and, he would be advised to go up and live on the Hump, so he could be near the people he was trying to ape.

“But there is much variety and change of fashion with us in the construction and ornamentation of our buildings, grounds and resorts, and the fashion prevailing in relation to the transmutation of the dead is making a steady inroad upon our total food supply.”

I wondered what he could mean by the transmutation of the dead—but said nothing, awaiting his explanation.

“You may have thought,” he went on, “that our dead were utilized and turned into lignite like other effete organic substances.”

“Certainly,” I said, “that disposition of a useless body is preferable to any method that prevails on earth. Here as soon as a man dies his presence becomes so intolerable to us, that we are obliged in self defense to consign him to earth. Even then the corruption resulting from dissolution is disseminated through the soil contaminating the water supply and starting epidemics of diphtheria and typhoid fever, besides occupying room that sooner or later is begrudged to him. Cremation is certainly an improvement on inhumation, but even that is a considerable expense, and when it is over, we have only a handful of raw mineral ashes left. The best part of the man has gone off in smoke and we have not three or four pounds of good coal left to show for him as you have. And then it ought to be a source of gratification to the defunct himself if he could know it, that his ‘corpus’ was turned to some useful account.”

He here turned his vast eyes upon me with such a deep expression of mild and sorrowful reproach, that I instantly felt as if I had made an exceedingly flippant speech and had said far too much or much too little, but he gave me no time to amend it.

“We are much more sentimental than that,” he said; “our dead are not cremated in the manner practiced on earth, but are totally disintegrated by electricity, and turned into their component elements. No portion of their substance is lost or dissipated, but the material is all conserved and caused to form a new organism. The fashion originated many ages ago, to use the materials to grow some common sort of a plant or shrub from the seed, such as something resembling your grass or fern or some cereal. This was done in the garden vats I have described to you. Plants grown under these circumstances or any circumstances for that matter, very often sprout or grow into forms differing slightly from the normal. Taking advantage of this, our botanists have produced food plants having a wonderful concentration of nourishing qualities in small compass and accompanied by the least possible quantity of waste products. And in like manner our undertakers have developed a great variety of plants to be grown from the constituent materials of the dead. It was formerly the fashion to preserve only a portion of the plants, thus grown. A few leaves were distributed among the friends of the deceased and pressed in herbariums for preservation. But the growing veneration for ancestors and consideration for each other together with the prevalent belief among us that we are formed in the very image of the Deity, finally brought about the practice of preserving entire, the plants produced by transmutation. Thus there is already a vast accumulation of these vegetable representatives of deceased Lunarians, and our economists point out that if this goes on, we will be compelled to constantly draw on our natural food reserves, and that finally these will all be consumed and everything eatable will at last become transmuted into these sacred and inviolable forms. In short the living race will finally become transmuted into dead dry plants. These arguments of the philosophers have as yet had no effect on the people and their priestly leaders. They denounce the philosophers as being unfaithful to the religion and traditions of the race, and as advocating cannibalism.