Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/329

 The moon had balanced her forces and entered upon organized life much sooner than our earth. While the latter was in cloud-boiling condition, such as Jupiter and Saturn still are, the moon was already a peopled world. Her atmosphere had, probably, at first, resembled our own, although much less dense, but it was afterwards changed in composition, and mostly absorbed. By help of the ready-made geological sections supplied by the fissures, we have been able to trace both the advent and the departure of man upon the moon. "The man in the moon" has at last been established as a real personage, at least in the past geological sense. He was of slighter frame than his brothers of the earth, and also less in height, and with a head, to our view, comparatively large to his body. After much subsequent research, we could trace in the various exposed strata, the gradual advance of the lunar animal world, with its highest culmination in man, and whence, by increasingly unfavourable conditions thereafter, it gradually retrograded, and became, as at present, all but extinct.

Some of the larger of the lunar slugs had been picked up on this first visit, with an eye to business, by a brother in the great provision trade, who had been ambitious and courageous enough to accompany the pioneers. These curious creatures lived upon moss-like vegetation in the fissures and cavities below the lunar surface, and upon certain other and smaller animals. From being afterwards prepared in a particular way, suggestive of old North-British curing practice, they got the name of "kippered lunites," and were so greedily taken by the market, that the brother provisioner in question made a rapid fortune.