LIFE IN OTHER SPHERES.

Otago Witness, Issue 1324, 14 April 1877, Page 3

LIFE IN OTHER SPHERES.

It is conceivable, indeed, that many, if not most, of the orbs which have come into being may not have supported life in the past, nor will support life hereafter. If many Beeds are to our view wasted for each one that grows and bears fruit, so may it be with planets. It is only our own minuteness which makes the scale of the planet seem so infinitely to transcend I the scale of the seed ; but to him in whose thoughts one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day the great and the small are alike, the planet is no worthier than the mustardseed, the seed no worthier than the planet. Even assuming, however, that each planet, statellite, asteroid, meteorite, or (passing in the other direction) each sun, sun system, and galaxy was intended to support life or be the abode of life, it remains equally certain, from what we know of the past history of our own earth that the life-era of a planet is but as a moment compared with the existence of the planet itself, and it is utterly improbable that the life-era of the earth synchronises with the life-era of any other planet of the solar system. The very argument from probability which leads us to regard any given planet or even any giveu sun, as not the centre of a scheme in which at this moment there is life, forces upon us the conclusion that among the millions on millions, nay, the millions of millions, of suns which people space, millions have orbs circling round them which are at this moment the abode of living creature. If the chance is one in a thousand in the case of each particular star, then in the whole number of stars (practically infinite) one in a thousand rules over a system in which there is life j and what is this, but saying that

millions of stars are life-supporting orbs ? There is, then, an infinity of life around us, although we recognise infinity of time, as well as infinity of space, in the existence of life in the universe. And, though remembering that life in each individual is finite, in each planet finite, in each solar system finite, in each system of sims finite, so (to speak of no higher orders) the infinity of life demonstrates the infinity of death, the infinity of inhabited worlds implies the infinity of worlds not as yet habitable, or which have long since passed the period of mhabitability.— Prof. Proctor.