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47 the universe. To be shy of anything resembling himself is part and parcel of man's own individuality. Like the savage who fears nothing so much as a strange man, like Crusoe who grows pale at the sight of footprints not his own, the civilized thinker instinctively turns from the thought of mind other than the one he himself knows. To © admit i into his ee ee 2 eS RS AL 22 fe a teeta oe abt fa eta conception of the cosmos other finite minds as factors has in it something of the weird. Any hypothesis to explain the facts, no matter how improbable or even palpably absurd it be, is better than this. Snowcaps of solid carbonic acid gas, a planet cracked in a positively monomaniacal manner, meteors ploughing tracks across its surface with such mathematical precision that they must have been educated to the performance, and so forth and so on, in hypotheses each more astounding than its predecessor, commend themselves to man, if only by such means he may escape the admission of anything approaching his kind. Surely all this is puerile, and should be outgrown as speedily as possible. It is simply an instinct like any other, the projection of the instinct of self- preservation. We ought, therefore, to rise above it, and, where probably points to other things, boldly accept the fact provisionally, as we should the presence of oxygen, or iron, or anything else. Let us not cheat ourselves with words. Conservatism sounds finely, and a ee We must be just as careful not to run to the other extreme, and draw deductions of purely local outgrowth. To talk of Martian beings is not to mean Martian men. Just as the probabilities point to the one, so do they point away from the other. Even on this earth man is of the nature of an accident. He is the survival of by no means the highest physical organism. He is not even a high form of mammal. Mind has been his making. For aught we can see, some lizard or batrachian might just as well have popped into his place in the race, and been now the dominant creature of this earth. Under different physical circumstances he would have been certain to do so. Amid the physical surroundings that exist on Mars, we may be practically sure other organisms have been evolved which would strike us as exquisitely grotesque. What manner of beings they may be we have no data to conceive. How diverse, however, they doubtless are from us will appear from such definite deduction as we are able to make from the physical differences between Mars and our earth. For example, the mere difference of gravity on the surface of the two planets is much more far-reaching in its effects than might at first be thought. Gravity on the surface of Mars is only a little more than one third what it is on the surface of the earth. This would work in two ways to very different conditions of existence from those to which we are accustomed. To begin with, three times as much work, as for example in digging a canal, could be done by the same expenditure of muscular force. If we were transported to Mars, we should be pleasingly surprised to find all our manual labor suddenly lightened threefold. But, indirectly, there might result a yet greater gain to our capabilities; for if Nature chose, she could afford there to build her inhabitants on three times the scale she does on earth, without their ever finding it out except by 1 As we all know, a very large man is much more unwieldy than a very small one. An elephant refuses to hop like a flea; not because he considers it undignified to do so, but covers any amount of ignorance and fear. interplanetary comparison.