"
"Nothing can be clearer!" resumed the brave Captain, once more rushing
to the charge. "Besides, even without this alternation of days and
nights, life on the lunar surface was quite possible."
"Of course it was possible," said Ardan; "everything is possible except
what contradicts itself. It is possible too that every possibility is a
fact; therefore, it _is_ a fact. However," he added, not wishing to
press the Captain's weak points too closely, "let all these logical
niceties pass for the present. Now that you have established the
existence of your humanity in the Moon, the Chair would respectfully ask
how it has all so completely disappeared?"
"It disappeared completely thousands, perhaps millions, of years ago,"
replied the unabashed Captain. "It perished from the physical
impossibility of living any longer in a world where the atmosphere had
become by degrees too rare to be able to perform its functions as the
great resuscitating medium of dependent existences. What took place on
the Moon is only what is to take place some day or other on the Earth,
when it is sufficiently cooled off."
"Cooled off?"
"Yes," replied the Captain as confidently and with as little hesitation
as if he was explaining some of the details of his great machine-shop in
Philadelphia; "You see, according as the internal fire near the surface
was extinguished or was withdrawn towards the centre, the lunar shell
naturally cooled off.
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