We extended a cordial greeting to our Venusian visitors, and they, on their part, gave to our people an equally loyal welcome. Our party stepped out upon Venus with much the feeling as though it had been their own familiar earth, the air and gravity pressure being nearly the same in both worlds, while the temperature at the place purposely selected for landing—namely, upon an elevated plateau within the planet's arctic latitudes—was found extremely congenial, protected, as it was, by the thick clouds of the Venusian atmosphere, from the blaze of the comparatively huge sun. The party from Venus, on the other hand, as we might have expected, had made for our tropics, where they found themselves fairly comfortable, so far as climate was concerned, although complaining that the reduced size and brilliancy of the sun gave a blank character to our skies.
Venus, although rather smaller than our earth, had probably not started any sooner under dynamic equilibrium, seeing she was in the warmer zone of the two. She had, however, with her stronger light-supply, made rather better scientific progress, while we of earth had admittedly taken the business lead. Partly on that account, Venus had altered her natural scenery less than we had done, under the pressure, common to both, of a rapidly increasing population. We, in this operation, had more of an eye to mere business and profit than our sister, who, like other of the fuller-light worlds, was given rather to science pursuit. But then Venus's surface had originally
