150 NATURAL SCIENCE [March 



the only other internal organs. Such is Mr Wells' Martian, " a 

 horror and a monstrous prodigy," The Martian, having no stomach, 

 cannot eat, much less digest : instead he injects the living blood of 

 other creatures into his own veins. He never sleeps, having no 

 extensive muscular mechanism to recuperate. The Martians are 

 without sex, and their young arise by budding. We are also 

 interested to find that Mr Wells' Martians are, as we suggested, 

 deaf " to what we hear, and realising their environment in ways 

 inscrutable to us," although it must be admitted that in this point 

 our author is not wholly consistent. 



Another piece of inconsistency lies in the black smoke, which 

 on page 145 is said to contain "an unknown element giving a 

 group of four lines in the blue of the spectrum," whereas on page 

 298 the same element shows " a brilliant group of three lines in 

 the green." This is a little fact that Mr Wells might have made 

 certain of without any trouble, for, as many little details prove, he 

 is well acquainted with various branches of science. It was, for 

 instance, an ingenious idea to suppose the Martian machines con- 

 structed on the plan of human joints and muscles, while assuming 

 the entire absence of that distinctively human invention — the 

 wheel. There are no bicycles in Mr Wells' Mars. 



Our Miceoscopic Allies 



We believe it is not a new suggestion that the red colour of Mars 

 is due to the red chlorophyll of the herbage, but the introduction of 

 the Eed Creeper and the Red Weed affords a detail not merely 

 ghastly in itself, but, preparing the way in an artistic manner for 

 the denouement which, as all our readers are aware, is the succumb- 

 ing of the Martians to the bacteria of this earth. This conclusion, 

 both from an artistic and scientific point of view, strikes us as the 

 best thing in the book. In the paragraph in which Mr Wells ex- 

 plains the end of the Martians, he expresses the place and functions 

 of bacteria so admirably that we cannot forbear quoting it : " There 

 were the Martians — dead ! — slain by the putrefactive and disease 

 bacteria against which their systems were unprepared ; slain as the 

 Eed Weed was being slain ; slain, after all man's devices had failed, by 

 the humblest things that God, in His wisdom, has put upon this earth. 

 " For so it had come about, as, indeed, I and many men might 

 have foreseen, had not terror and disaster blinded our minds. These 

 germs of disease have taken toll of humanity since the beginning of 

 things — taken toll of our pre-human ancestors since life began here. 

 But by virtue of this natural selection of our kind, we have de- 

 veloped resisting-power. To no germs do we succumb without a 

 struggle, and to many — those that cause putrefaction in dead 



