COST OF LIFE. 203 



the inconceivable. Siemens lias made a very unsatisfactory effort to 

 show that the force is conserved. He has made but few converts to 

 his theory. It is the purpose of this monograph merely to expand the 

 received idea of waste, by showing that the recipients of the prodigal 

 bounty of the great giver of all good in our solar system the sun 

 are far fewer than is usually supposed. 



Before the spectroscope taught us that the reign of chemism is co- 

 extensive with that of physics, many conjectures were indulged in by 

 astronomers as to the iuhabitability of the planets in general. It was 

 taken for granted that there was probably an endless variety in the 

 forms, composition, and even original substance of matter. Vegeta- 

 tion and animalism probably assumed wonderful shapes, and were 

 capable of existing amid conditions not only altogether different from 

 the terrestrial, but altogether incompatible with life on this earth. 

 This conception, unphilosophical a priori, and indirectly the fruit of 

 the wonder-instinct and that bias inherited, according to Comte, from 

 the theological regime, has been swept away, and the reign of law 

 extended to the mystic dream-lands of the universe. No thinker so 

 loosely hinged now as to imagine life without a certain degree of 

 heat, light, and without oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, and all the chemi- 

 cal elements, and that too in protean forms. Nay, more, the forms and 

 succession of life must be, wherever found, substantially such as we 

 are familiar with. If Venus has human inhabitants, they are not one- 

 eyed Cyclops, nor does vegetation bury its leaves in the ground and 

 spread its roots in the air. Organs, and functions, and instinct are 

 there also, subject to the grand laws of selection and development. 

 Further, the absence of conditions essential to the sustenance of life 

 on our globe would be equally fatal in any other. This brings up 

 the question in hand the scarcity, as a part of the problem of the 

 cost, of life. 



What planets are inhabited ? Let us begin with the giant worlds 

 on the verge of the system. In the first place, as might have been 

 conjectured even before the revelations of the spectroscope, from their 

 great volume of light as compared with their distances from the sun, 

 all of these great bodies are self-luminous. They are at least incandes- 

 cent, and doubtless Jupiter and Saturn are in a fluid, perhaps gaseous 

 state. There can not be the slightest doubt that they are no more fit 

 for life than the sun itself. Will they ever become the habitations of 

 living things ? Ignoring their distance from the sun, which to an in- 

 habitant of Saturn would have about the apparent magnitude that 

 Jupiter has to us, there are other considerations which set that ques- 

 tion at rest. 



The volume of Jupiter, for example, is about 1,280, Saturn 991, 

 Uranus 80, times that of the Earth. The density of Jupiter being 

 about 1-40 and that of the Earth 5*48, it follows that the attraction 

 exerted by Jupiter is, roughly, 300 times that of the Earth. A man 



