THE
LUNARIAN PROFESSOR
AND
His Remarkable Revelations Concerning
the Earth, the Moon and Mars
TOGETHER WITH
An Account of the Cruise of the
Sally Ann
BY
JAMES B. ALEXANDER
AUTHOR OF THE DYNAMIC THEORY, THE SOUL AND ITS BEARINGS
AND OTHERS
MINNEAPOLIS, MINN.
1909
COPYRIGHT 1909
BY
JAMES B. ALEXANDER
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
Preface.
I. An Outing 1
An Old Time Adventure 2
Cruise of the Sally Ann 4
The M. & N. W. Railway 10
An Old Stake 14
II. The Professor 17
III. The Moon and Its People 31
IV. Lite on and in the Moon 51
V. Mundane Prognostication 70
The Profile of Time 73
Single Tax 81
VI. Confiscation of Lands 93
Purchase of the Railways 101
Regulation of the Currency 105
Socialism 107
VII. Woman’s Rights 113
The Family 117
Progress in the Church 119
VIII. Marriage and Divorce 124
Changes in Map of U. S. 128
Russia and England 129
New Political Divisions 133
The Flying Machines 140
Sun Power 152
Over Population 155
IX. Pessimism vs. Optimism 158
The Three Grand Nations 164
X. The Third Sex 182
The Decay of the Family 187
XI. The Millenniums 195
The Man of the 100th Millennium 199
XII. Universal State and Language 207
XIII. Mars and the Martians 225
XIV. The Canals 238
The Moons 241
XV. The Great Debt 255
Deimos and the Great Cable 260
XVI. Phobos 268
The New Cable 273
Proposed Abduction of Mars 277
The Return Voyage 282
Appendix 283
PREFACE.
The reader will please remember that this visit and revelation of the
Lunarian Professor took place in 1892, seventeen years ago, and some of
the predictions are already due of fulfillment or of apparent progress
in that direction. For example he gives Minneapolis a population of
1,780,000 in the year 1925 only sixteen years from the present. This is
worse than Walton. But I do not feel at liberty to alter the Professional
utterances. If I should begin to do this I would never know where to
stop. There will doubtless be found other predictions at variance with
our ideas, especially as to the time in which the fulfillment should
take place. Time is the most uncertain element concerned in prophetic
utterances. Give a prophet time enough and he will successfully predict
you anything you like. “All things come to him who _waits_.” But I have
not the assurance to change anything the Professor has said and I am not
prepared to aver that the truths as they appear to common mundane mortals
are to be preferred to the errors however manifest of so illustrious a
prophet—just as we accept the dicta of Moses or St. Paul—when we are
entirely sure they do not know what they are talking about. Our Professor
is probably wrong in regard to the settlement of some of the questions
taken up by him, but to tell the honest truth, I am too ignorant of the
disputed points to contradict him. If he says black is white it is safer
for me not to talk back. But when it comes to plain statements of facts,
concerning the present conditions on the Moon and Mars, in which, from
the abundance of personal knowledge there remains no license to draw upon
his imagination for his facts, I implicitly trust the Professor. I never
saw a pair of eyes so full of honesty for their size, or of as large
capacity for honesty as his. Even there, however, some of his statements
are liable to be contradicted. For example, the theory of the hump or
protuberance on the hither side of the Moon, which had some currency
among our astronomers 40 or 50 years ago appears later to have been
abandoned by at least some of them, but we should not allow mere theory
to counter-balance the testimony of a competent eye witness.
It may seem strange that the Professor has made almost no mention of the
great Japanese-Russian war. But as this war settled nothing, did not
even settle what there was to be settled it may be considered as a mere
incident in the discussion of the real question at issue. This is only my
conjecture of the reason of his silence.
The point of view assumed by a Prophet is of little consequence compared
with what he sees. Some say, back-sight is more reliable than foresight,
and that, considered as a magazine of facts, history is preferable to the
imagination. But back-sight is history, and like good liquor it requires
aging and maturing. The association of the imagination supplies these
effects. History must be read with the help of the imagination even for
present use; still more if the inquiry embraces a glance into the future.
_Si quaeris futura, circumspice._ If you would know the future look
around you. That which has been will be. All things have ever been under
the domination of evolution and they ever will be. Therefore, let the
imagination explore its trail, and you are at once a prophet.
CHAPTER I.
An Outing.
Let me see. It was six (6) years since I had an outing. It seemed a long
time and it was long enough to obscure the conviction I had once arrived
at that the average outing is on the whole more of a bore than a pleasure
and that its principal value consists in making a fellow satisfied with
his ordinary work and glad to get back to it again. I am tolerably sure
that I should have reached the same opinion even if I had not been the
victim of a certain wretched adventure that happened away back in my
“courting days”. On the occasion referred to I had taken my best girl
for a little rowing and fishing on Brush Lake. We had not proceeded far
when she “got a bite”, and it nearly drove her wild with excitement, she
stood up in the boat and from her frantic exertions I judged she had
hooked nothing less than a six pound bass. At last she pulled it out with
a horizontal sweep, and whirling around with it, the middle of the line
struck my head with such force as to send the fish revolving around my
neck five times, and wound up by inserting the hook in the end of my nose
and leaving the fish dangling and flapping against my face—a ridiculous
little Sunfish not over three inches long. The excited lady dropped her
pole and made such a violent lunge to secure her prize that she upset
the boat and left us both floundering in the water. Amongst the fifteen
or twenty spectators on the shore was Aquarius Jinks, whose father was
a fisherman and had brought him up to think no more of jumping into the
water than a water spaniel. So in he jumped and in a jiffy he rescued my
lady and took her to the nearest house to get some dry clothes. As for
myself, I was getting out all right in spite of the embarrassment of the
choking line, my lacerated nose and that wretched fish that did not for
a moment let up its frantic struggling and flapping. In addition to this
I had the misfortune to be encumbered by the clumsy assistance of a fat
German saloon-keeper, who by the help of the pole, which had now floated
near the shore, drew me up, amid the jeers of the crowd, that now by the
barbarous custom of the times, I was obliged to “treat.”
This exposure laid me up for six weeks with the chills, and about the
end of that time there was a wedding—my girl married that Jinks, who
took this perfidious advantage of me. I felt very sore for a long time
in the region of the diaphragm. The poets usually designate the heart as
the particular organ affected in such cases, but I am persuaded it is
the semi lunar ganglion or solar plexus, probably the former, from the
fact that the victim is apt to be affected by semi lunacy. But that is a
question of physiology.
Although I never had another such disastrous experience, yet as I said at
first, the average outing with its accidents, fatigues and discomforts,
had on the whole, left no very favorable impression on me. Yet I had made
up my mind after an interval of six years to try one more. My literary
work had tired me out, and a trip, if it gave no pleasure, would hurt at
least in another place.
August the third, 1892, found me installed in a cottage, at Cottagewood,
at the eastern end of Lake Minnetonka. My plans were simple. I had a gun,
a boat and fishing tackle, but of these I intended to make small use. I
would rest most of the time, and lie under the trees and read or loaf as
I saw fit. I would buy my food of such kind and in such condition as to
take but little time for its preparation, for I intended to “keep bach”
for which I was qualified by more or less previous experience. If at any
time I wanted a square meal, I could take a row around to the St. Louis
hotel, or if the wind were favorable could sail over to the Lafayette,
or to Excelsior. In short, I meant to rest and take it easy; do nothing
at all to-day, that I could put off till to-morrow. I thought this all
over the first day and in accordance with the programme proceeded to make
myself as lazy as possible. I succeeded well. It requires but little
effort to become lazy when one is in the afternoon of life. During a week
my activity was reduced to a minimum; I saw but few people, although I
had neighbors only a few rods away concealed by the thick brush, that
grew between us. Once a dog came and after looking around, trotted away.
As I sat or lolled on a rustic bench near the lake, the drowsy monotonous
lapping of the water against the shore kept me for hours on the border
land of sleep, just in that condition in which one does not know whether
the motions of his brain are dreams or waking thoughts, and in which he
often dreams that he is dreaming. The sound of the distant puffing of a
steam yacht or the merry laughter of a sailing party, that occasionally
ricocheted to the shore rather directed than disturbed the train of these
passive activities.
The exhausted body or brain is like a machine that has run too long
without being oiled. It goes with reluctance and with damaging wear and
tear. But when we are thoroughly rested, the motives that before were
unable to move us, now set us going with the greatest facility.
After the rest and quiet of a week, I began to feel an impulse to do
something or to go somewhere; and a short debate settled that I would
take a trip by sail and oar to the upper lake. As I did not intend
to hurry and might be gone two or three days, I laid in a stock of
provisions accordingly; with such cooking apparatus as a coffee pot
and frying pan. Nowhere is a cup of coffee, a slice of ham, crackers
and cheese so relishable as when they satisfy real thirst and hunger
alongside a camp-fire of dry sticks. Then perhaps I might shoot a duck or
hook a croppy. At night the sail stretched over a fishing pole could be
formed into a shelter tent, something like the “dog tents” Uncle Sam gave
us for shelter in the southern campaigns in the early sixties. In short
I intended to make a regular cruise, and as my boat was named Sally Ann,
this trip should be known in history as the cruise of the Sally Ann.
It was a fine morning when, all things ready, I hoisted sail. The wind
was from the southeast and I started off before it at an exhilarating
speed, steering northwest. In a short time I came abreast of Big Island,
when turning west skirting its north shore, I soon got becalmed, the
island cutting off the wind. I was obliged to take the oars, but as I
dallied and loitered along, it was a full hour before I passed the island
and caught my breeze again. I was here steering southwest across the wind
and heading for the narrows, and the canal leading into the upper lake.
Nothing can exceed the beauty of this lake, no matter at what point the
view is taken. At this place looking northeast over the stern of the
boat, the village of Wayzata partly obscured by Spirit Island, appeared
as if seated in the water half a mile away, though in reality it is five
miles. On the southeast within a mile, was the Lake Park hotel and beyond
it, half a mile further and across the entrance to Gideon’s Bay, a part
of Excelsior could be seen climbing its picturesque hills, while along
the piers at the bottom of their slopes, were numerous steam and sailing
crafts of various kinds, besides a fleet of row boats.
As I approached the entrance to the canal, I observed standing on the
south bank, a man with a gun in his hand and dressed in outing costume,
whose figure and attitude reminded me of someone I had seen before. “Can
it be possible,” I said to myself, “that that is Allan Ocheltree?” By the
time the boat touched the land, I had made sure that it was and I sprang
ashore to greet him. The recognition and gratification at meeting were
mutual. Our friendship for each other, was always the closest friendship
either of us had. We had been room-mates and class-mates for four years
at college, and our temperaments and tastes were like complementary
colors, of such harmonious contrast as to fit each other to a T. In our
class we were to each other like the two end men of a minstrel troup; he
at one end—the head end—and I at the other. It is singular how people,
like drift wood on the stream of time, are at times drifted toward each
other and float along together till some eddy or obstruction in the
current separates them, and hurries them off in diverging directions,
perhaps to meet again farther down the stream, it may be more than once.
Sometimes a leave-taking under circumstances, that seem to forebode
it to be the last and clothe it in gloom, and sorrow, is nevertheless
not the last by many; while a cheerful good-by with a light hearted
“ta-ta-old-fellow-see-you-to-morrow,” may prove the beginning of a
separation destined to endure for years—perhaps forever.
The Ocheltree family and my ancestors, were from the same Scotch-Irish
stock, were friends and neighbors near Belfast and emigrated to Maryland
about two hundred and thirty years ago, settling at first in Somerset
County. A few years later they moved north into Cecil County, and from
there in 1760 a large emigration took place to Mechlenburg County,
North Carolina. Among these emigrants, were Duncan Ocheltree and my
grandfather’s Uncle John. These two were friends and neighbors in the new
settlement and when the revolutionary war broke out, they both adopted
the patriotic cause. The Mechlenburg declaration of independence was
adopted and signed May 20th or 31st, 1775, by a convention of which
John was secretary, and it was supported by Duncan. But in 1780, Lord
Cornwallis overran the state and captured Charlotte, the county seat
of Mechlenburg, and Duncan, believing all was lost, hastened to turn
Tory and make his submission to his lordship in order to save his wealth
of which he had acquired a goodly share. This was a bad break and he
made it worse by the supererogatory zeal of a new convert, in harassing
his former friends and piloting the red-coated foragers to their hay
stacks, hen roosts and pig pens, not sparing his old friend John. But
the triumph of Cornwallis was short; in a few days, he was obliged to
evacuate Charlotte and then Duncan realized that he had placed himself in
a very bad position. As the British troops were packing their knapsacks
preparatory to decamping from Charlotte between two days, Duncan
determined to throw himself upon the generosity of his former friend
John, and so under cover of the darkness he rode out to his farm-house
nine miles in the country. John, who was two miles off in the patriot
camp, was sent for. Duncan surrendered his sword and begged his old
friend to forgive bygones and advise him what to do. John’s sympathy
for him at that stage of affairs was not particularly tender as may be
supposed, but nevertheless his advice was no doubt the best possible.
He said: “Ocheltree, neither your life nor your property is safe in
Mechlenburg. The Whigs will take both. Your only safety is in instant
flight. I advise you to reach the Yadkin before daylight.” He took the
advice. And so they parted. Four generations later like two stray straws
on a flood, Allan Ocheltree and I were floated into the same class
room at school. Did it make any difference to me or to him that his
great grandfather, made a bad guess seventy years before? Not a bit.
Every man’s ancestral tree is just the same height as all the rest, his
lineage is just as long and his pedigree must contain practically the
same number of terms whether we reckon back to Adam or to the Ascidian
or to original protoplasm. Not a member of the long line made himself
or the circumstances surrounding him, and in no two cases were these
precisely the same. The circumstances that made Confucius or Alexander
the Great, or Julius Caesar, or Columbus, or Washington never happened to
anybody else. It was no fault of the obscure ancestors or descendants or
cousins near and remote of those worthies that these circumstances never
surrounded _them_. On the other hand it cannot be ascribed to the merit
of the long line of those belonging to the dead level of the average,
in size and in quality, that they have been missed by the untoward
circumstances that selected certain individuals to be in one respect or
another conspicuously below that dead level.
After quitting college, Allan and I occasionally ran across each other,
but the last meeting before this, occurred in 1876 on Arch Street,
Philadelphia. He was interested in an exhibit in the great exposition,
and being then in a great hurry made an appointment to meet me next
morning. I kept the engagement, but he was not there. I knew urgent
business had turned up to prevent him, and after I returned to my home I
received his letter saying so, and appointing another hour. This letter
had missed me at my hotel and followed me to Illinois. Here then, we were
having our reunion sixteen years after it was due. But now we could make
up for lost time for neither had engagements that required attention for
a week at least. It was speedily arranged that Allan should accompany
me and that we should carry out together the plan I had proposed for
myself. He wrote a note for his boarding house keeper in Excelsior,
saying he would be gone some days, and gave it to a rowing party going
to Excelsior, that we shortly after fell in with, and who cheerfully
consented to deliver it. The wind was still from the southeast, but light
and we slowly sailed westerly and south-westerly passing successively
the state fruit farm and Sampson’s place lying on our left, and Spring
Park on our right, had in a short time reached Howard’s Point that juts a
third of a mile into the lake from the south shore. We sailed through the
strait between this and picturesque Rockwell’s Island with its attractive
summer hotel, and restful looking surroundings, and turned southwest
toward Smithtown Bay.
We entered Smithtown Bay, but did not go to the end of it, for the
wind was not favorable, and as we turned west toward the highlands of
the upper lake I fell into a reminiscent mood. Up to this time we had
occupied ourselves in admiration of the delightful scenery and in such
careless chat as occurred to us, sometimes taking a pull at the oars,
when we entered a locality becalmed by being screened from the wind,
and sometimes pulling in the fish line that dragged over the stern of
the boat to see why we never got a bite. But here the memories that
crowded upon me completely absorbed my attention and I became silent. I
had tramped all over this country in 1877 in the selection of a route
for the Minneapolis and Northwestern Narrow Gauge Railroad, and so was
familiar with the topography, not only of the upper lake, but of the
whole route from Minneapolis to Hutchinson. The first preliminary line
surveyed from Hutchinson to Minneapolis in the latter part of November,
1877, passed along the foot of the high bluff just in front of us, but
the line was not finally located till October, 1879.
When I explained to my friend how the line passed south-easterly along
the foot of the bluff, at the edge of the water, except where it dodged
behind Hoflin’s headland, and then swept around the head of Smithtown
Bay turning north-easterly toward Excelsior, “I declare,” he exclaimed,
“there never was so romantic a place to locate an excursion railroad. So
attractive a line ought surely to have been built. Why wasn’t it?”
“Well,” I replied, “it was a case of infanticide.”
“How was that?” he asked.
“You’ve heard of treacherous midwives and nurses and murderous
baby-farmers being subsidized to strangle an unwelcome cherub as soon as
it is ushered into the world?”
“Yes, was it a case of that sort?”
“This infant was born healthy and vigorous after what might be called a
rather protracted period of gestation—some thirty months. It had no less
than twenty-one nurses in the shape of directors, which number was four
times as great as it should have been and one over.
“When there is such a mob of officials, the management usually devolves
on a few of the more active and interested. That active minority in this
case somehow either had from the first, or acquired, a greater interest
in killing this enterprise to please its rivals than in carrying it out
in good faith.”
“How did the line run west of here?” he asked.
“It passed northwesterly along the foot of the bluff yonder, on the top
of which you see Smith’s stone house, then along the shore just in front
of the “hermitage”, and a quarter of a mile beyond that it turned toward
the west and cutting through the ridge of the peninsula that separates
the upper lake from Halsteds Bay, it skirted the south shore of that bay,
and thence bore in a generally westerly and northwesterly direction,
through Minnetrista township to St. Boniface and thence to Watertown.
“Halsteds bay itself is so secluded as to form practically a separate
lake and a beautiful one too.”
“Suppose we sail up along this shore,” said Ocheltree, “I am quite
interested in the place.”
We turned the nose of Sally Ann toward the northwest and sailed slowly
before the very light wind. We passed Crane Island lying upon the right—a
sort of lying-in hospital and nursery strictly sacred to the use of
Cranes only, whose occupancy dates back of the earliest settlement of
the country, and whose title has been secured to them by an act of the
legislature, against the claims of all featherless bipeds. Further on,
upon the mainland, is the hermitage and just in front of it the grave
of Halsted, who many years ago, lost his life in the lake so sadly and
mysteriously. A short distance beyond the hermitage, I pointed out the
place where the survey left the shore of the main lake and cut across to
Halsteds bay. We concluded to go on to the strait leading into that bay
and sail around to its south shore. To reach the strait involved sailing
north a mile and then over half a mile west. As the wind was still
favorable this was soon accomplished. But when we reached the strait, we
could no longer use the sail, and were obliged to have recourse to the
oars. Inside the bay there was but little wind, and that was against us,
as our route now lay due south. A little over a mile of rowing brought
us to the south shore of the bay. Here the bluff covered with timber and
underbrush slopes down to the water’s edge. Along the foot of this slope,
I pointed out to Ocheltree the position of the narrow gauge survey. “It
is a wonderfully romantic place for a pleasure road,” said he.
It was now considerably past noon, and our exercise had begun to tell on
us both somewhat and to suggest a rest and something to eat. Accordingly
we pulled the boat up on the beach, and got out some cooking utensils
and provisions. I started off to collect some dry sticks to make a fire
and Allan took a pail and proceeded along the shore to find a deep place
or a boulder from which he could dip up clear water for our coffee. We
happened to go together for a few rods, when glancing up the slope a
short distance, I discovered a stake sticking in the ground. I gave an
exclamation of surprise and quickly ran to secure it. It proved to be
what I suspected, one of the stakes of the narrow gauge survey. “What
have you found, old fellow?” Allan asked. I told him, and it seemed
surprising to both of us that that frail bit of a pine stick should
have survived the storms and accidents of thirteen years. We had used
for stakes on those surveys common plastering lath; one lath four feet
long being cut in the middle made two stakes. This was such a stake, an
inch and a half wide and three-eighths of an inch thick. It owed its
exceptional preservation to the fact that it was full of pitch and to its
protected position. It had been driven in a slanting position, partly
under the body of a large fallen tree, that lay over the point where the
stake should have been set. The number of the stake had been written
with red chalk, on the side that had happened to come underneath and so
was largely protected from the rains. But it was now illegible, four red
blotches being all that remained.
A person walking through our Minnesota woods will often meet with a
little mound of earth, alongside of which he will see a cupshaped
depression in the ground. The depression marks the spot where at some
time in the past there stood a noble tree, and it indicates that the
tree yielding to the force of an ancient tornado was toppled over, and,
pulling its roots out of the ground drew up with them a cubic yard,
more or less, of earth. Afterwards when the roots began to decay the
earth was dropped in a heap beside the hole. There was such a mound and
hollow at the west end of the rotten log in question, showing that it
had been overthrown by the fierce assault of a western hurricane. The
mound was old, well rounded by the action of the weather and covered with
a mat of grass. I sat down on this mound in a half reclining position,
with the stake in my hand, and tried again without success to make
out the number[1]. A solitary mosquito was singing about my right ear,
and persisted in returning and constantly evaded my efforts to capture
it. Directly however, its wings became still, and unaccountable stupor
appeared to steal over me, my head drooped over toward the left till it
touched the grass and for a moment I was unconscious. But it was only for
a moment for a new consciousness almost immediately supervened. It was a
consciousness composed chiefly of subjective sensations, although I hold
that even subjective sensations, very often in an unperceived manner,
receive their direction and stimulation to activity from objects around
us. But that is a question of psychology. At all events the sensations,
I am about to relate were the most remarkable I ever experienced, and at
the time were not accompanied by the least intimation, that they were not
purely objective.