i894. NOTES AND COMMENTS. 163 



on Mars, a much wider set of problems at once arises. For we are 

 more interested in the possibihty of the existence of that reasoning 

 inteUigence which, within our experience, is always associated with 

 such integrations of protoplasmic structures as we find in man and 

 the higher animals. The framework and structure of all animals and 

 plants are adapted so intimately to the existing conditions of gravity, 

 that the course of the evolution of life under other conditions must 

 elude even our imagination. If from the same simple beginnings a 

 chain of life has grown up upon Mars, it must have grown up so 

 different that to us its final results would be a horror and a monstrous 

 prodigy. Even if it has grown so that its highest result has like us 

 become able to be conscious of a side or part of the absolute truth of 

 things, it is very improbable that this consciousness, acting in terms 

 of and through different sense organs, possibly upon a different side of 

 the absolute truth, could ever come into relation with ours. If ever 

 we could "open up communication with Mars" in the sense of pro- 

 jecting such physical signs as would be intelligible to minds acting 

 through sense organs like our own, it is more than probable that 

 they would be unintelligible to minds deaf to what we hear, blind 

 to what we see, not feeling what we touch, and realising their environ- 

 ment in ways inscrutable to us. 



Lord Salisbury's Address. 



The University of Oxford and the English nation have equal 

 reason to be proud of the remarkable address of the President of the 

 British Association ; for, so far as the University is concerned, their 

 supreme officer, the Chancellor, is chosen for very different reasons 

 than his eminence in science ; so far as the nation is concerned, Lord 

 Salisbury is honoured as a man of affairs, as one who gained worthily 

 and held worthily the great office of her Chief Minister. It is the 

 fashion to say that the University is the home of effete culture ; it is 

 Ihe fashion to say that politics are in the hands of mere rhetoricians, 

 of shallow devotees of expediency. Here is the head of a great 

 University, an acknowledged leader of politicians, who can hold 

 ■enthralled on scientific subjects an audience as full of scientific experts 

 as ever is gathered together. Discount all one may for the modula- 

 tions of the practised speaker, for the political habit of exquisite 

 adaptation to an audience, it remains to be said that unless Lord 

 Salisbury had had soHd scientific matter in his speech, as well as 

 subtle intellectual form, he would not have received the enthusiastic 

 reception that was his. 



It is easy to analyse his arguments and to criticise his conclu- 

 sions. To these agreeable tasks we shall presently address ourselves. 

 It is not so easy, on after thinking, to account for the general scientific 

 .approval of an address which was really an exposure of what the 



M 2 



