But in the former
case, great labour is required to force nature beyond her ordinary
limits, and the same labour must be unceasingly kept up, or she will
certainly relapse to her original dimensions. This system may do, as our
host here tells us it actually does, for the moon, but it is not suited
to our earth. If, however, you are ambitious of a name among the
speculative men of your country, this little stone," added he, stooping,
and picking up a small stone from the ground, "will answer your purpose
quite as well as any improvement in husbandry. It is precisely of the
same species as those which we threw over in our aerial voyages, and
which, though correctly called moon-stones by the vulgar, (who are
oftener right than the learned suppose,) some of the western
philosophers declared to have been gravitated in the atmosphere."
"And is this really the origin," said I, "of that strange phenomenon,
which has furnished so much matter of speculation to the sages both of
Europe and America?"
"Nothing is more true," replied he. "These stones are common to the
earth and to the moon; and some of those which have been so carefully
analyzed by your most celebrated chemists, and pronounced different from
any known mineral production of the earth, were small fragments of a
very common rock in the mountains of Burma. In our first voyages we had
taken some of them with us as ballast; and those which we first threw
over, we afterwards learnt from the public journals, fell in France,
some of the others fell in India, but the greater number in the ocean.
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