62 .The Humming Bird. 



chapters in this highly entertaining volume will afford some 

 notion of the nature and variety of its contents. A careful 

 perusual of the book by those interested in the Dark Continent 

 will tend greatly to elucidate the African problem, which has 

 so puzzled and disheartened many in this generation, and 

 which may be solved by the next. G.A. 



INHABITED WORLDS. 



W. A. H. (Willimantic, Conn.) (i) I s it not a fact that our 

 earth is the only globe in the universe inhabited by 

 intelligent human beings ? (2) Is it believed by those 

 who know best that there is an inhabited planet in our 

 solar system besides the earth ? fjj If so, are those 

 inhabitants supposed to be organized like human beings ? 

 (4) What arguments are adduced in favour of the theory 

 of the plurality of worlds. 



(1) According to the best modern calculations, there are 

 no less than 500,000,000 of stars of various magnitudes within 

 the range of the best telescopes, and photography reveals an 

 infinitude of worlds, which baffles all attempts to be conceived 

 by the human mind. Our own sun, itself 1300 times larger 

 than our own planet, sinks into insignificance beside that 

 giant sun, Sirius, and the latter in its turn is dwarfed by other 

 luminaries in infinite space. In view of this fact it would be 

 mere presumption to assert that our microscopic earth — a 

 " grain of sand on an infinite seashore" — is the only centre of 

 intelligent life. 



(2) The fact that most of the planets, as the stars beyond 

 our system, are inhabited, has been admitted by men of 

 science. Laplace and Herschell believed it, though they wisely 

 abstained from imprudent speculations, and the same conclusion 

 has been worked out and supported with an array of scientific 

 considerations by Camille Flammarion, the well-known 

 French astonomer. Of the long list of great thinkers who 

 believed in the plurality of inhabited worlds in general we 

 only mention the great mathematicans Leibnitz and Bernouilli; 

 Isaac Newton himself, as can be read in his "Optics;" 

 Buff on, the naturalist ; Condillace, the sceptic : Beilly, Lavator, 

 Bernadin de St. Pierre, Diderot, and most of the writers of 

 the Encyclopaedia. Following these comes Kant, the founder 

 of modern philosophy; the poet philosophers, Goethe, Krause, 



