Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/701

Rh If, feeling so spry, he thinks he will play a little, he is again surprised to find that while he could formerly leap only to the height of his hips, he can now jump twice as high as his head. If the Eiffel Tower is near by, and he climbs it, he gets to the top four times as quickly as formerly. If he lives in Savoy and climbs Mont Blanc, he feels only one fourth the fatigue of the olden time, and will be very apt to think that somebody has given him a very full dose of some invigorating extract while he was asleep. He is no less astonished when he finds how little danger there is in falling. His child falls down a whole story without being hurt, and he drops fragile things, his water pitcher, for example, without their breaking.

In the same way, but inversely, the inhabitant of Mars, transplanted to the earth, would feel four times as heavy: his leaps would be only a quarter as high; the steps, going up and down stairs, would be four times too high, although they would look the same as ever. Any climb, not to speak of the Eiffel Tower or of Mont Blanc, would take away his breath; and he would be ready to think he had all at once become decrepit.

Fairy stories, and such humorists as Swift and Voltaire, have made us familiar with the idea that there may be cities of dwarfs and of giants copied exactly from ours; and we do not perceive, at first sight, why they should not have their Paris, with the Louvre, boulevards, and hotels, built after earthly models. We could easily fancy that if Gulliver, arriving at Lilliput or Brobdingnag, had become smaller or larger, according to the measure of his hosts, he would not have remarked the diminutiveness of Lilliput and the Lilliputians, or the great size of Brobdingnag, and the Brobdingnagians. This fancy is the more natural at first sight because we have invented the art of drawing and other arts relating to it, and the microscope and photography show us every day considerable enlargements and diminutions without alteration of shapes.

It is, however, not consistent with the most incontestable results of science. The cat is not an exact reduction of the tiger, or the Lilliputian of the Brobdingnagian, any more than a small crystal of alum is a reduction of a large crystal—although one regular octahedron may be the exact image of another octahedron. For if they were, there would no longer be a question of atoms, or molecules, or cells. From the geometrical point of view the cell, the molecule, and the atom are infinitely divisible universes, and therefore capable of containing all imaginable figures within their limits; while from the chemical and physiological point of view they are absolute quantities not capable of reduction in their kind.

Now let us see if a Martian house can be constructed wholly on the plan of an earthly house—that is, if it can be made to present the