Part 22 (1/2)

The humble little planet that we inhabit presents itself to us as a bri at every outlet Life is everywhere From the bottoetation that carpets the soil, from the mold in the fields and woods, froious, and perpetual reat voice of Nature, the sum of all the unknown andto us, from the ocean waves, from the forest winds, from the 300,000 kinds of insects that are redundant everywhere, and lobe A drop of water contains thousands of curious and agile creatures A grain of dust from the streets of Paris is the hoarden, field, orto produce assimilable sli population If we gather a flower, detach a leaf, we everywhere find little insects living a parasitic existence Swares fly in the sun, the trees of the wood are peopled with nests, the birds sing, and chase each other at play, the lizards dart away at our approach, we trample down the antheaps and the molehills Life enwraps us in an inexorable encroachment of which we are at once the heroes and the victi itself to its own detriment, as imposed upon it by an eternal reproduction And this from all time, for the very stones of which we build our houses are full of fossils so prodigiously ram of such stone will often contain eometrical perfection The infinitely little is equal to the infinitely great

Life appears to us as a fatal law, an imperious force which all obey, as the result and the aim of the association of atoms This is illustrated for us upon the Earth, our only field of direct observation We must be blind not to see this spectacle, deaf not to hear its reaching On what pretext could one suppose that our little globe which, as we have seen, has received no privileges from Nature, is the exception; and that the entire Universe, save for one insignificant isle, is devoted to vacancy, solitude, and death?

We have a tendency to iine that Life can not exist under conditions other than terrestrial, and that the other worlds can only be inhabited on the condition of being similar to our own But terrestrial nature itself de We die in the water: fishes die out of the water Again, short-sighted naturalists affirorically that Life is impossible at the bottom of the sea: 1, because it is in complete darkness; 2, because the terrible pressure would burst any organism; 3, because all motion would be impossible there, and so on Sos up lovely creatures, so delicate in structure that the daintiest touch ht in these depths: they make it with their own phosphorescence Other inquirers visit subterranean caverns, and discover anians have been transforht have we to say to the vital energy that radiates round every Sun of the Universe: ”Thus far shalt thou come, and no further”? In the name of Science? An absolute mistake The Known is an infinitesimal island in the midst of the vast ocean of the Unknown The deep seas which seemed to be a barrier are, as we have seen, peopled with special life Some one objects: But after all, there is air there, there is oxygen: oxygen is indispensable: a world without oxygen would be a world of death, an eternally sterile desert Why? Because we have not yet cos that can breathe without air, and live without oxygen? Another mistake Even if we did not know of any, it would not prove that they do not exist But as it happens, we do know of such: the _anaerobia_ These beings live without air, without oxygen Better still: oxygen kills the as we ought the spectacle of terrestrial life, and the positive facts acquired by Science, we should enlarge the circle of our conceptions and our judgments, and not lie of what is in existence here below Terrestrial organic forms are due to local causes upon our planet The chemical constitution of water and of the atht, are so one to foren, hydrogen, and oxygen combined in the state of water, and of so which we may instance sodium chloride (salt) The flesh of animals is not chemically different from our own

All this coain

The sa bodies

The ox that browses on the grass is foranized terrestrial matter is only carbon coen, etc

But we have no right to forbid Nature to act differently in worlds from which carbon is absent A world, for example, in which silica replaces carbon, silicic acid carbonic acid, anisms absolutely different from those which exist on the Earth, different not only in form, but also in substance We already know stars and suns for which spectral analysis reveals a predoel and Deneb In a world where chlorine predoht expect to find hydrochloric acid, and all the fecund fa an iht not bromine be associated in other formations? Why, indeed, should we draw the line at terrestrial chemistry? What is to prove that these eleen, nitrogen, and sulphur all be compounds? Their equivalents are en the most simple of the elements? Is not its le species of prieht constitute the molecules of the so-called simple elements?

In our own solar system we discover the essential differences between certain planets In the spectrum of Jupiter, for instance, we are aware of the action of an unknown substance that manifests itself by a as, which does not exist upon the Earth, is seen still more obviously in the atmospheres of Saturn and Uranus Indeed, upon this last planet the atmosphere appears, apart froy with our own And in the solar spectrum itself, many of the lines have not yet been identified with terrestrial substances

The interrelation of the planets is of course incontrovertible, since they are all children of the sa themselves, not merely in respect of situation, position, voluain in physical and chemical constitution And the point ould now accent is that this diversity should not be regarded as an obstacle to the manifestations of life, but, on the contrary, as a new field open to the infinite fecundity of the universal , not only to our neighbors, Moon, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, or Saturn, but still ravitate round the suns disse that the inhabitants of these other worlds of Heaven reseanic substance

The substance of the terrestrial human body is due to the elements of our planet, and notably to carbon The terrestrial human forradually raised itself by the continuous progress of the transformation of species To us it seems obvious that we are s, two ar is less a matter of course That we are constituted as we are, is si also had a head, a heart, lungs, legs, and arant than your own, it is true, Madam, but still of the say, we are delving down to the origin of beings As certain as it is that the bird derives froanic evolution, so certain is it that terrestrial Huical tree, whereof all the lied into the very rudianisms

The inable and uniinable form Terrestrial man is endoith five senses, or perhaps it is better to say six Why should Nature stop at this point?

Why, for instance, s an electrical sense, a an able to perceive the ethereal vibrations of the infra-red or ultra-violet, or perh walls? We eat and digest like coarse aniestive tube: may there not be worlds in which a nutritive atmosphere enables its fortunate inhabitants to dispense with this absurd process?

The least sparrow, even the dusky bat, has an advantage over us in that it can fly through the air Think how inferior are our conditions, since the enius, the ar caterpillar before its e to inhabit a world in which we ht fly whither ould; a world of scented luxury, full of animated flowers; a world where the winds would be incapable of exciting a teloith the ruby, or the ehts and scarlet days) in the glory of an eternal spring; within the mirror of the waters, phosphorescent mountains, aerial inhabitants,--men, woifted with multiple sensibilities, luminous at will, incombustible as asbestos, perhaps immortal, unless they commit suicide out of curiosity? Lilliputian atoination is but sterility, in the limpsed by the telescope

One inored expressly by those who blindly deny the doctrine of the plurality of worlds It is that this doctrine does not apply more particularly to the present epoch than to any other _Our_ time is of no importance, no absolute value Eternity is the field of the Eternal Sower There is no reason why the other worlds should be inhabited _now_ more than at any other epoch

What, indeed, is the Present Moh which the Future falls incessantly into the gulf of the Past

The immensity of Heaven bears in its bosom cradles as well as tombs, worlds to come and perished worlds It abounds in extinct suns, and cemeteries In all probability Jupiter is not yet inhabited What does this prove? The Earth was not inhabited during its primordial period: what did that prove to the inhabitants of Mars or of the Moon, ere perhaps observing it at that epoch, a few lobe must be the only inhabited world because the others do not resemble it, is to reason, not like a philosopher, but, as we reht to assume that it is impossible to live out of water, since its outlook and its philosophy do not extend beyond its daily life There is no answer to this order of reasoning, except to advise a little wider perception, and extension of the too narrow horizon of habitual ideas

For us the resources of Nature may be considered infinite, and ”positive” science, founded upon our senses only, is altogether inadequate, although it is the only possible basis of our reasoning We must learn to see with the eyes of our spirit

As to the planetary systeer reduced to hypotheses We already knoith certainty that our Sun is no exception, as was suggested, and is still maintained, by soh

It is surely an exceptional situation that, given a sidereal systeravitating round him, the plane of such a system should fall just within our line of vision, and that it should revolve in such a way that the globes of which it is composed pass exactly between this sun and ourselves in turning round hi this transit As, on the other hand, the eclipses would be our onlythe existence of these unknown planets (save indeed froht have seemed quixotic to hope for like conditions in order to discover solar systems other than our own But these exceptional circumstances have reproduced themselves at different parts of the Heavens

Thus, for instance, we have seen that the variable star Algol owes its variations in brilliancy, which reduce it fronitude every sixty-nine hours, to the interposition of a body between itself and the Earth, and celestial mechanics has already been able to determine accurately the orbit of this body, its di of the sun Algol Here, then, is a system in which we know the sun and an enormous planet, whose revolution is effected in sixty-nine hours with extreme rapidity, as measured by the spectroscope