CONDITIONS OF HABITABILITY OF A PLANET. 101 



the two last paragraphs, in which the author seems to be working 

 towards a philosophical centre, from which w^e may be able to see 

 the teachings of Science and Revelation in one common perspective. 



Communication from Sydney T. Klein, Esq. F.L.S., etc. : — 



The Institution is to be congratulated on having such an expert 

 as Mr. Maunder to tell us the latest phase of the old controversy as 

 to the existence of life upon the planets ; there is no astronomer 

 living who has done more in the way of popularizing the Science of 

 Astronomy than Mr. Maunder has done, especially in his connection 

 with the British Astronomical Association ; he is indeed a worthy 

 successor of Richard A. Proctor, and his present paper will be 

 highly appreciated by our members. I have been much interested 

 in the paper and especially his remarks on the planet Mars. 



The writer of the paper seems to have restricted himself to the 

 question w^hether the planets are inhabited noic, he does not touch 

 upon the larger question whether they may have been inhabited in 

 the past or may in the future be the abode of sentient beings similar 

 to ourselves ; now this is rather an important point, especially w^hen 

 the argument tends, as it does in the paper, to suggest that one par- 

 ticular world only, namely the Eiu^th, has been prepared by design to 

 be the home of man. The planets of the solar system are all in 

 different and distinct stages of what may be called grow^th in 

 preparation for life, such giant and remote planets as Jupiter, 

 Saturn, Uranus, and Xeptune have not yet reached or are only just 

 arriving at the stage of consolidation, a stage which the Earth went 

 through probably fifty million years ago when the moon had its 

 birth ; whereas, on the other hand, Mars, Mercury and the moon, 

 having small masses, have progressed faster and are probably in a 

 stage well in advance of the Earth; whilst Venus, of practically the 

 same mass as the Earth, although about one-fourth nearer to the 

 sun, has so dense an atmosphere that her physical conditions are 

 probably very like our own and her organic life similar to ours. 



AVith regard to the so-called "canals" in Mars, I think 

 Mr. Maunder was the first to point out that if you place a number 

 of black dots on a white card and look at it from a long distance, the 

 eye at once forms lines of those dots, and this is probably the true 

 explanation of what Mr. Lowell claims he saw, and that it was upon 

 these pseudo-perceptions that he made his wonderful drawings; 

 there were certainly no such canals shown on the photographs he 



