206 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 



M. Alp. Milne-Eduards states that they are chiefly birds, which give the 

 special character to the animal population of the antarctic zone. One would 

 have imagined that birds, endowed with the means of flight or swimming would 

 be able to migrate to other and more genial regions. 



M. Faye has examined the popular idea of the constitution of the moon ; 

 the large grey spaces, so visible during the first quarter of our satellite, are not 

 seas, as the ancient astronomers concluded; there is not a single drop of water in 

 the moon even in its most profound pits: the most fanciful names were given to 

 these assumed seas; Felicity, Dreams, Calms, and Crisis, and hence were pre- 

 sumed to influence on our earth, marriages, mental life and maladies. In the 

 moon there is no trace of rubbings of rocks, etc., having never had water, the moon 

 had no agen*;s of disintegration to act on its surface, as rain, rivers, torrents, 

 and snow d^ non our globe ; all is vacuum on the surface of the moon and 

 nothing preser s so well as vacuum. On looking at Mars through a telescope, 

 that planet presei. ,; a difi"erent aspect as compared with the moon; it possesses an 

 atmosphere; it has seas and continents, fogs and snow; its north pole is white 

 like the earth's, and the temperature increases as the tropics are approached. It 

 is possible that Mars is inhabited; it has oxygen and watery vapor, but other 

 things are necessary for the sustenance of animal and vegetable life. Plants can- 

 not live without carbonic acid, and if this be absent in the atmosphere of Mars, 

 vegetation being impossible, animal life cannot exist. Is that planet inhabited, 

 but with beings different from us ? No, is the response of science, for the more 

 we know of science, the more we see the fundamental laws of nature become 

 general and extend to the whole universe. Everywhere we find the same chem- 

 ical elements, in the heavens as on the earth; the same affinities, the same com- 

 binations, as well in the stones which fall from the sky, in the most distant stars, 

 as in our laboratories. Why then ought it not to be the same with the essential 

 laws of life ? Universal physiology cannot then differ from ours. Plants cannot 

 live on a planet where the temperature never rises above freezing point, and 

 never descends below that of boiling water. In the first place germination could 

 not take place, the seed would be frozen; in the second, the seed would be 

 cooked. 



There are no volcanoes in the moon, because that would suppose the exist- 

 ence of water, and eruptions are caused by sea water penetrating by fissures into 

 the bowels of the earth, there acting, as Daubree has shown, on the molten i-ilicates 

 of the internal mass; incorporating with and transforming without extinguishing 

 them, into a boiling and explosive mass. All volcanoes are situated on the bor- 

 ders of sea or oceans, and emit vast quanties of watery vapor. Further, lime is 

 an essential of life. When our planet commenced cooling down, its first envelope 

 was granite, for the simple reason, that the elements of granite, being the lighest 

 of all primitive matters, ought to have kept near the surface. Granite contains 

 no chalk, that indispensable ingredient of organic life, hence, why no fossils are 

 found in the granite, but under the unequal pressure of the solidified crust, and 



