LIFE IN OTHER WORLDS 



cooled at a later period than the moon, life might have 

 begun earlier on the Moon, and would have had, per- 

 haps, many hundreds of thousands of years in which to 

 develop. Mr. Wells therefore imagined the "Selenites" 

 to resemble in some respects a race of very large insects 

 with enormous brains. However, we need pursue these 

 romantic speculations no further, but must turn to 

 inquire not whether life might exist in the interior 

 of the Moon (which we can never see), but what would 

 be the kind of life that could exist on the part of the 

 Moon that we can see. 



In the first place, we believe that the atmosphere 

 there would be very, very thin; as thin as the atmo- 

 sphere which is left in the bell-receiver of an ordinary 

 air-pump when the experimenter has done the best he 

 can to exhaust it of air altogether. 1 In the second place, 

 the atmosphere would not be one of oxygen and nitrogen 

 as that of the earth is, but of some heavy gas like 

 carbon-dioxide (which will not support animal life). The 

 question is whether it would support vegetable life. 

 Several astronomers (no less eminent a one than W. H. 

 Pickering, of Harvard University, among them) have 

 supposed that it might, and they have imagined great 

 jungles of vegetation springing up on the surface of the 

 Moon under the influence of the Sun's rays jungles which 

 are stricken down again when they are four days old 

 under the oncoming of night. For the Moon's day is 



1 The exhaustion produced by an ordinary air-pump is never a 

 complete vacuum. Exhaustion which leaves only yiro^th of the origi- 

 nal air is unusually efficient. 



123 



