He and his friends had seen her with their own eyes, and under such favorable circumstances as to be altogether exceptional.

Regarding her formation, her origin, her inhabitability, they could easily tell what system _should_ be rejected and what _might_ be admitted.

Her past, her present, and her future, had been alike laid bare before their eyes.

How can you object to the positive assertion of a conscientious man who has passed within a few hundred miles of _Tycho_, the culminating point in the strangest of all the strange systems of lunar oreography?
What reply can you make to a man who has sounded the dark abysses of the _Plato_ crater?
How can you dare to contradict those men whom the vicissitudes of their daring journey had swept over the dark, Invisible Face of the Moon, never before revealed to human eye?
It was now confessedly the privilege and the right of these men to set limits to that selenographic science which had till now been making itself so very busy in reconstructing the lunar world.

They could now say, authoritatively, like Cuvier lecturing over a fossil skeleton: "Once the Moon was this, a habitable world, and inhabitable long before our Earth! And now the Moon is that, an uninhabitable world, and uninhabitable ages and ages ago!" We must not even dream of undertaking a description of the grand _fete_ by which the return of the illustrious members of the Gun Club was to be adequately celebrated, and the natural curiosity of their countrymen to see them was to be reasonably gratified.