MEN IN OTHER WORLDS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLV, Issue 13781, 20 June 1908, Page 5 (Supplement)

MEN IN OTHER WORLDS.

Mr. H. G. Wells lias made us all familiar with fascinating and imaginative speculations as to the possible inhabitants of Mars. In the Nineteenth Century, however, Mr. Louis Robinson points out the overwhelming odds against the probability of any such beings. THE MARTIANS. Tho Martians:, in this writer's opinion, can have no resemblance to the inhabitants of this earth: — " Popular speculations as to the nature of the supposed inhabitants of Mars, which crop up whenever Martian discoveries are announced from Flagstaff Observatory and elsewhere, may here be alluded to in passing. Whatever the presumed Martians may be like, it would certainly be impossible for us, if we met one of them, to recognise him as a. man and a urother. Beings who can perform gigantic labours, such as the digging of " canals" compared with which the Mississippi is a mere gutter, with not more than one-eighth of our atmosphere to breathe meanwhile, must have a chest development which would distort them out of all semblance to humanity; while the low force of gravity in Mars would enable people of average weight to get about on legs not much stouter than those of a collie dog. According to some careful observers, such as Professor Campbell, of the Lick Observatory, it is oven an open question whether Mars has any more atmosphere than the moon. More than this, certain leading physicists, quoted by Mr. Alfred Russell Wallace, have declared that no oxygen, hydrogen, or water could exist on so small a world without being dissipated into space and sucked up by ourselves and the sun. Hence it has been suggested that the ''polar snow caps" of Mars may consist cf solid carbonic acid gas. From this point of view our Martian neighbours must subsist upon an atmospheric regimen of carbonic acid instead of upon' one of air, and hence would be more likely to resemble trees in their physical constitution than the higher animal. Such a notion opens up an inviting field for imaginative winters who wish to rival Mr. H. G. Wells. Here below we irrigate and cultivate passive and helpless vegetables, There, perhaps, an, alert and enterprising vegetable population. is watering and fertilising the soil on its own initiative and for its own private ends. CHOSS-ROADS OP EVOLUTION. Mr. Robinson then goes on to enumerate some of the many partings of the way, the correct selection of which led, by an almost miraculous adaptation to environment, to the unguessed-at goal of humanity. Earliest of all in these blind " choices" was the choice of oxygen. Time passes, and the will to be vertebrate establishes a new development. The sea is abandoned for the land, and another vast sign-post of evolution is passed. Then from these coldblooded reptiles, flung up by the sea, there gradually emerged two sets of creatures with warm blood—birds and mammals. Things were-much easier for the bird, but it was the mammal who had chosen the true road: — They were little, feeble beings, not much bigger than rats, and it seems wonderful; that they should have escaped at all from their hungry swarms of enemies. In their long grapple for supremacy with the ' monstrous efts,' which were then lords and masters of earth, it was their warm blood full of oxygen that saved them." Then helplessness drove these little animals to the trees, and at last the wonderful hand was formed which literally groped after manhood.