Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/356

 and honour depended upon mere personal considerations? The radical blast of these days might try its best to strip Marsians of the warmth and security of all this old accustomed clothing; but the stronger it blew, the more tightly and lovingly would they still cling to their venerable Lottery-box, and their sacred hierarchy of Accident.

As we had taken the express to Io, the very much longer voyage on which we now embarked was to be made at much greater relative speed than we had experienced to Mars. We were able, also, from the relative positions of Mars and Io at the time, to make a pretty straight course to the latter, which avoided almost entirely the dangerous intermediate archipelago of the ultra-zodiacal planetoids. This and the other Jovian moons, in their somewhat cooler zone of the solar system, and with their own primary's heat still tempered by thick cloud envelopes, have been fortunate in a more prolonged life than our satellite; but they have not, by any means, made the same rapidity of progress that had set in upon our moon for its briefer career. The first and second Jovian moons have both attained indeed the culminating human stage; but only in the first is there as yet a fair degree of civilization, the second being still toiling its way through the usually protracted stage of flint-chipping. The third moon, Ganymede, although considerably the largest of all, and therefore, so far, of promising ultimate future, is as yet only up to the anthropoidal stage, while the fourth, Callisto, is still further astern.