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INHABITED WORLDS. 273 



are wholly peculiar to this petty world of ours. 

 It may well be that the special conjunction of 

 minute circumstances which renders the existence 

 of life possible may never have occurred, and may 

 never again occur, upon any one of the countless 

 orbs that speck the vast expanse of the heavens. 

 Or, again, it may well be that life is an almost 

 inevitable incident in the existence of a planet ; 

 that every cooling and condensing world, supplied 

 with light and heat from some neighboring sun, 

 becomes naturally the scene of living energies on 

 the part of creatures resembling plants and ani- 

 mals as we know them. But, in either case, there 

 is surely no necessity to look upon life, human or 

 other, as the end and aim of the entire universe. 

 To do so is to fall into a narrow and restricted 

 human fallacy. We know that all the innumera- 

 ble fixed stars which stud the evening sky are not 

 and cannot be the abode of living creatures. We 

 know that our own sun, a molten mass so infi- 

 nitely bigger than this petty earth, is not and can- 

 not be a dwelling-place for plant or animal. We 

 know that, from one cause or another, our satel- 

 lite, the moon, and most of our sister planets are 

 quite incapable of supporting life upon their fiery 

 or frozen surfaces. We know that for ages and 

 ages our own earth was equally unable to meet 

 the conditions of animal existence, and that, even 

 after she had attaiued to the evolution of life, 



