Page:In the high heavens.djvu/51

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THE PHYSICAL CONDITION OF OTHER WORLDS.
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find ourselves. But suppose that we managed to bring a supply of oxygen that might enable us to avoid suffocation by the use of artificial respiration, we should still find the moon a very strange world. We could hear nothing, for sound exists not except in air. We could strike no match or light no fire. We could feel no wind and see no clouds. There would be also an embarrassment of a different kind which there would not be any way of obviating.

Suppose that we were actually on the moon, and that we had in some way obtained the necessary provision both of air and of water, and had begun to walk about, we should experience sensations of a novel description. The extraordinary lightness of everything would be specially noticeable. Take a lump of iron which weighs six pounds on the earth, you would find on the moon that it seemed to weigh only as much as one pound would do on the earth. Everybody knows that it requires considerable exertion to lift a 56 lbs. weight here, but on the moon it would hardly require as much effort as you ordinarily have to put forth to lift ten pounds. Indeed, the weight of every object on the moon would be reduced to the sixth part of that which the same object has on the earth. No doubt in some ways this might prove a convenience to the moon dwellers, Their bodies would partake of the general buoyancy; walking and running would be amazingly facilitated; and the same effort that would enable you to jump over an obstacle three feet high here would carry you with ease over a wall eighteen feet high on the moon. A good cricketer can throw a ball about a hundred yards here. If he made the same exertion on the moon he could throw the ball over a third of