Other Worlds | Page 4

a lively war of opinions rages. Not all
astronomers have joined in the dispute--some have not imagination
enough, and some are waiting for more light before choosing sides--but
those who have entered the arena are divided between two opposed
camps. One side holds that Mars is not only a world capable of having
inhabitants, but that it actually has them, and that they have given
visual proof of their existence and their intelligence through the
changes they have produced upon its surface. The other side maintains
that Mars is neither inhabited nor habitable, and that what are taken for

vast public works and engineering marvels wrought by its industrious
inhabitants, are nothing but illusions of the telescope, or delusions of
the observer's mind. Both adduce numerous observations, telescopic
and spectroscopic, and many arguments, scientific and theoretic, to
support their respective contentions, but neither side has yet been able
to convince or silence the other, although both have made themselves
and their views intensely interesting to the world at large, which would
very much like to know what the truth really is.
And not only Mars, but Venus--the beauteous twin sister of the earth,
who, when she glows in the evening sky, makes everybody a lover of
the stars--and even Mercury, the Moor among the planets, wearing "the
shadowed livery of the burnished sun," to whom he is "a neighbor and
near bred," and Jupiter, Saturn, and the moon itself--all these have their
advocates, who refuse to believe that they are lifeless globes, mere
reflectors of useless sunshine.
The case of the moon is, in this respect, especially interesting, on
account of the change that has occurred in the opinions held concerning
its physical condition. For a very long time our satellite was confidently,
and almost universally, regarded as an airless, waterless, lifeless desert,
a completely "dead world," a bare, desiccated skull of rock, circling
about the living earth.
But within a few years there has been a reaction from this extreme view
of the lifelessness of the moon. Observers tell us of clouds suddenly
appearing and then melting to invisibility over volcanic craters; of
evidences of an atmosphere, rare as compared with ours, yet manifest
in its effects; of variations of color witnessed in certain places as the
sunlight drifts over them at changing angles of incidence; of what seem
to be immense fields of vegetation covering level ground, and of
appearances indicating the existence of clouds of ice crystals and
deposits of snow among the mountainous lunar landscapes. Thus, in a
manner, the moon is rehabilitated, and we are invited to regard its
silvery beams not as the reflections of the surface of a desert, but as
sent back to our eyes from the face of a world that yet has some slight
remnants of life to brighten it.

The suggestion that there is an atmosphere lying close upon the shell of
the lunar globe, filling the deep cavities that pit its face and penetrating
to an unknown depth in its interior, recalls a speculation of the
ingenious and entertaining Fontenelle, in the seventeenth
century--recently revived and enlarged upon by the author of one of our
modern romances of adventure in the moon--to the effect that the lunar
inhabitants dwell beneath the surface of their globe instead of on the
top of it.
Now, because of this widespread and continually increasing interest in
the subject of other worlds, and on account of the many curious
revelations that we owe to modern telescopes and other improved
means of investigation, it is certainly to be desired that the most
important and interesting discoveries that have lately been made
concerning the various globes which together with the earth constitute
the sun's family, should be assembled in a convenient and popular
form--and that is the object of this book. Fact is admittedly often
stranger and more wonderful than fiction, and there are no facts that
appeal more powerfully to the imagination than do those of astronomy.
Technical books on astronomy usually either ignore the subject of the
habitability of the planets, or dismiss it with scarcely any recognition of
the overpowering human interest that it possesses. Hence, a book
written specially from the point of view of that subject would appear
calculated to meet a popular want; and this the more, because, since Mr.
Proctor wrote his Other Worlds than Ours and M. Flammarion his
Pluralité des Mondes Habités, many most important and significant
discoveries have been made that, in several notable instances, have
completely altered the aspect in which the planets present themselves
for our judgment as to their conditions of habitability.
No doubt the natural tendency of the mind is to regard all the planets as
habitable worlds, for there seems to be deeply implanted in human
nature a consciousness of the universality