Life Conditions in other Worlds. 87 



LIFE CONDITIONS IN OTHER WORLDS. 



The question of whether other worlds are inhabited by 

 intelligent beings, having other creatures below them, as we 

 have, cannot fail to interest the human mind, and necessarily 

 comes up for reconsideration from time to time as fresh dis- 

 coveries suggest new thoughts. We have, therefore, thrown 

 together the following pages for the sake of supplying hints 

 drawn from recent investigations. Our object has not been 

 to exhaust the subject, but simply to afford aids for its 

 contemplation. 



The association of stars and planets with life reaches back 

 to times when man's dawning reason first studied the celestial 

 orbs, and supposed them the abodes of beings capable of 

 influencing mortal affairs ; and when, through the revelations of 

 the telescope, it became known that the planets bore more or less 

 resemblance to the earth, and that the so-called fixed stars 

 might be bodies of the same nature as our sun, it required no 

 great stretch of imagination to conjecture that unnumbered 

 worlds, traversing the fields of space, were inhabited by 

 creatures more or less analogous to man. Fontenelle gave an 

 extensive popularity to these views through the publication of 

 his Entretiens Sur la Pluralite des Mondes, in which he asserted 

 that the fixed stars were suns, and that as our sun illuminated 

 planets, so did they. In peopling the various globes, Fon- 

 tenelle had recourse to a lively fancy, and did not limit himself 

 by any nice considerations of philosophy, so that we are not 

 surprised at his describing lunar cavities, and then asking, 

 " Who knows but the inhabitants of the moon take refuge 

 from solar heat in these great pits V 3 As science advanced, the 

 different characters of the planets became better appreciated, 

 and it was seen that creatures able to live on our airless moon, 

 or on the huge, light globe of Saturn, must be widely different 

 from those we are acquainted with on the earth. No accurate 

 analogies help us in these inquiries, because our earth does not 

 anywhere exhibit an assemblage of conditions similar to those 

 which any other planet experiences. For example, if we look to 

 Mars, the most earth-like of the planets, we find that by reason 

 of his distance from the sun, he only receives about 43 

 hundredths of the light and heat that reach us. If this 

 were the only difference, the hottest parts of Mars and the 

 coolest parts of the earth might be compared together ; but 

 then we find that from difference of density and size " a body 

 which would weigh one pound on the earth would weigh only 

 half a pound if transported to Mars."* The Martial day of 

 * Breen, Planetary Worlds. 



