Chess, draughts, cards, dominoes--everything in fact, but a
billiard table?"
"What!" exclaimed Barbican; "cumbered yourself with such gimcracks?"
"Such gimcracks are not only good to amuse ourselves with, but are
eminently calculated also to win us the friendship of the Selenites."
"Friend Michael," said Barbican, "if the Moon is inhabited at all, her
inhabitants must have appeared several thousand years before the advent
of Man on our Earth, for there seems to be very little doubt that Luna
is considerably older than Terra in her present state. Therefore,
Selenites, if their brain is organized like our own, must have by this
time invented all that we are possessed of, and even much which we are
still to invent in the course of ages. The probability is that, instead
of their learning from us, we shall have much to learn from them."
"What!" asked Ardan, "you think they have artists like Phidias, Michael
Angelo and Raphael?"
"Certainly."
"And poets like Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakspeare, Goethe and Hugo?"
"Not a doubt of it."
"And philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Bacon, Kant?"
"Why not?"
"And scientists like Euclid, Archimedes, Copernicus, Newton, Pascal?"
"I should think so.
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