LIFE IN OTHER WORLD'S.

Dominion, Volume 1, Issue 235, 27 June 1908, Page 4

LIFE IN OTHER WORLD'S.

The sight or the stara 011 a cloudless night swinging through spaco m their glittering hosts is always impressive. It becomes doubly so when we picturo to ourselves. that amongst the millions of bodies which are shodding their light on us from almost inconceivable distances there may perhaps be worlds like our ■own, "filled with life and business, and with intelligent beings, possibly something after our own pattern, nightly warming themselves at their firesides as .the mighty phantasmagoria of the Universe goes rushing on to some unknowable and unthinkable destiny. Ever since man began to think at all ho has been puzzling himself to. discover what that destiny is. One solution after another has been put forward, examined, and accepted, only to be found untenable on a closer analysis. In the scientific fervour of fifty years ago, logic- and reason were considered the only touchstones of truth, and the average scientist gave no place in the scheme of things to the personal'and immanent God the blind instincts of his fellows had always craved. But ,as man has studied his own mind—the little yard stick with which he measures the stars and their orbits—ho has learned that, marvellous as are its powers, the limitations to the knowledge that he may consciously acquire' area fixed and definite. He can perceive the differences between one thing and another, the relationship of this thing and that, but, he can know nothing in itself. His. senses tell him •that he lives in the midst of a material universe made up of four things—time, space, matter, and motion—all • equally incomprehensible in their essence. Ho cannot think of matter as infinitely divisible, and ho cannot think of it as not infinitely divisible; nor can ho pieturo in his mind without a fatal gap tho change from rest to motion. For the scientist to speculate about the origin and end of universo whoso elements are, and must always be, inconceivable to his mind, is to wasto his strength in futile beating against tho bars of his prison. Wo can but push back a littlo the curtain of darkness that has obscured from our eyes, the wonderful sequence of cause and effect in nature. By a laborious proccss of putting two and two together, and Comparing similarities with dissimilarities, we have discovered man's kinship with tho animals, and traced the gradations by which animal lifo shades off into vegetable, and vegctablo life into the inorganic. Latterly astronomy has beon tolling us of similarities between 'pur own, and other worlds.. Spectrum

analysis, so far as it goes, shows the presence in the sua and other stars of the same elements as are in the earth. A great naturalist, Dr. A. R. Wallace, in a reccnt book, contended that scienco had been too hasty in abandoning the old theory that the world was the centre of the universe, and man a unique masterpiece. Nevertheless scientific thought is tending in a directly opposite direction. In a rccently-publishcd book Professor Aiiuuf.nius, the great Swedish chemist, puts forward the theory that life is being continually diffused throughout the universe from star to star and planet to planet. The microscope has revealed to us the presence of countless bacteria floating in the air. There is every reason to suppose that these may be wafted up into the very highest lcvols of the atmosphere, and on to the verge of the ether of space. Wc now believe that large quantities of solar dust are being continuously discharged by the sun, some of which falls into the earth's atmosphere, charged with negative electricity, becoming visible in the polar Auroras. It is quite possible, argues Professor Aurhenius, that the tiny life-giving germs in the high levels of the atmosphere, on the solar dust falling among them, would themselves become charged by attraction with negative cloctricity, and then by repulsion from the similarly charged atoms of solar dust, would be pushed out into the ether. Once that happened they would by the forces of gravitation and radiation travel at incredible speeds until attracted by some planet or star. Many would be consumed in blazing suns, others would be wasted in dead worlds, but as with the thistle-down blown about on the wind, some few germs would land on suitable worlds, and from them would begin an evolution similar to that which the scientist believes to have occurred on the earth. These are in the broadest form Professor Arrhenius's conclusions. They are supported by closely reasoned argument and an imposing array of facts. That the .gorms on this voyage through space would not perish in the intenso cold is deduced from the fact that tho intensest cold that can be produced in the laboratory has failed to destroy some forms of bacteria. All life, tho biologists are agreed, results from protoplasm, which is in itself a complex chemical compound. Professor Arrhenius does not believe' in the spontaneous generation of protoplasm from inorganic matter. Almost every year announcements have-been made that the secret of lifo has been- discovered, and that some chemist has taken dead matter and endowed it with activity and the power of reproduction, but all have proved baseless. Tho dreams of a spontaneous generation of onergy led to the construction of many. perpetual motion machines, each , with. some fatal defect, and were at length dispelled by the negative results of all experiments, and in tho same way, says the Professor, we shall have, to give up the idea of the spontaneous generation of life after all tho disappointments in this field of investigation. Life, he argues, is eternal and indestructible, and.. can only be transformed; but in placc of the comparative isolation of man'lie claims the relationship of all lifo throughout the vast Universe. Whether there are men in other worlds is a very different question •from whether there .is lifo in other worlds. Man is so. minutely adapted to his,surroundings in this planet, and those have boon so many turning points in, his evolution from the, primordial slime, or whatever it may have been that he came from, that it would seem exceedingly improbable that the same process should bo exactly duplicated. The inhabitants of Mars, a recent writer points out, would probably require chests of such an abnormal sizo as to distort tliem out of all resemblance to humanity, and on account of the low force of gravity.in that planet an average man could walk about on legs not much stouter than those.of a collie dog. Man's marvellous hand was developed, so science says, in his arboreal days, when monkey-like he swung from branch to branch in tho forest. In a world without trees a very different being would probably have evolved. At a tb.oijsa.nd and one stages of his history some small feature of tho environment has decided the lines on which his progenitors should develop. Is it possible that it should all have been duplicated on any other one of the millions of worlds floating through space?. Science can tell us nothing on the point.