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.