Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/703

Rh the mass of the hammer being eight times less, and the muscular force being no more than eight times less, the velocity impressed upon the hammer will not be half, but equal. The objection is well founded; but then the phenomenon of the fall of the hammer will not be the same as it would be on the earth. An observer situated in the common center of the two suns would see the Martian's hammer drop twice as fast as the terrestrian's. Or the objection might take another form. The velocity of the hammer may remain proportional, but the muscular exhaustion will be four times less, so that the workman can quadruple the number of his blows. In this case the temporal phenomenon, if I may call it that, will be changed. At any rate, if he does not multiply his blows, the nail will not be driven in in the same way. To whichever side we turn, we fall into the same definitive conclusion.

We further remark that the Martians can lift loads four times as heavy as ours: first, because they do not have to carry them so high; and, secondly, because the weight is only half as much. Thus the unfortunate people who built the pyramids on Mars would require only a quarter of the time. Consequently, Megamicros will see all tasks that consist in raising weights performed four times as rapidly. If he builds a house, it will be under roof before he could have got it aboveground on the earth. Life thus passes more rapidly on Mars than on the earth; and yet we can not think of diminishing the length of the days, for then we would increase the number in the year to fourteen hundred and sixty; for we have supposed the new Martian year to be of the same length as that of the earth.

Megamicros, who has learned on the earth to reckon by terrestrial measures, will have a new set to deal with when he is transported to the new Mars. Some may say that he will experience no difficulty in this. They are mistaken.

To speak first of measures of length and surface: If Megamicros required six square metres of cloth to make himself a complete suit of clothes when he was on the earth, he will need no more on Mars, because the surface of his body which he has to cover is diminished in the same proportion as that of the square metre, or as four to one. But as the sun sends him no more heat there than our sun does to us, the goods he will select must be at least as warm as on the earth. No reduction, therefore, is possible in their thickness. Hence, if he himself makes the goods he requires, if his wife knits his stockings and his vests, they will be surprised at the amount of labor they will have to expend, and the quantity of materials they will have to use for the same purpose. With a skein of a hundred metres of yarn, working with a double thread, they will not make more than half of