ARE THE STARS INHABITED.

Press, Volume LIII, Issue 9325, 28 January 1896, Page 6

ARE THE STARS INHABITED.

Man is a creature adapted for life under circumstances which are very narrowly limited. A few degrees of temperature more or less, a slight variation in the composition of air, the precise suitability of food, make all the difference between health and sickness, between life and death. Looking beyond the moon, into the length and breadth of the universe, we find countless celestial globes with every conceivable vaiiety of temperature and of constitution. Amid this vast number of worlds with which epace is tenanted, are any inhabited by living beings? To this great question science can make no response : we cannot tell. Yet it is impossible to resist a conjecture. We find our earth teeming with life in every part. We find life under the most varied conditions that can be conceived. It is met with in the burning heat of the tropics and in the everlasting frost at the poles. We find life in caves where not a ray of light ever penetrates. Nor is it wanting in the depths of the ocean, at the pressure of tons on the square inch. Whatever may be the external circumstances, nature generally provides some form of life to which those circumstances are congenial. It is not at all probable that among the million spheres of the universe there is a single one exactly like our earth—like it in the possession of air and water, like it in size and in composition. It does not seem probable that a man could live for one hour on any body in the universe except the earth, or that an oak-tree could live in any other sphere for a single season. Men can dwell on the earth, and oak-trees can thrive therein, because the constitutions of the man and of the oak are specially adapted to the particular circumstances of the earth. Could we obtain a closer view of some of the celestial bodies, we should probably find that they, too, teem with life, but with life specially adapted to the environment—life in forms strange and weird; life far stranger to us than Columbus found it to be in the New World when he first landed there. Life, it may be, stranger than ever Dante described or Dore sketched. Intelligence may also have a home among those spheres no less than on the earth. There are globes greater and globes less— atmospheres greater and atmospheres less. The truest philosophy on this subject is crystallised in the language of Tennyson :—