hings metallic, Dick," I replied. "But that does not necessarily mean
that they are composed of any metal that we know. Nevertheless, being
metal, they must be of crystalline structure.

"As Gregory has pointed out, crystals and what we call living matter had
an equal start in the first essentials of life. We cannot conceive life
without giving it the attribute of some sort of consciousness. Hunger
cannot be anything but conscious, and there is no other stimulus to eat
but hunger.

"The crystals eat. The extraction of power from food is conscious
because it is purposeful, and there can be no purpose without
consciousness; similarly the power to work from such derived energy is
also purposeful and therefore conscious. The crystals do both. And the
crystals can transmit all these abilities to their children, just as we
do. For although there would seem to be no reason why they should not
continue to grow to gigantic size under favorable conditions--yet they
do not. They reach a size beyond which they do not develop.

"Instead, they bud--give birth, in fact--to smaller ones, which increase
until they reach the size of the preceding generation. And like the
children of man and animals, these younger generations grow on precisely
as their progenitors!

"Very well, then--we arrive at the conception of a metallically
crystalline being, which by some explosion of the force of evolution
has burst from the to us familiar and apparently inert stage into these
Things that hold us. And is there any greater difference between the
forms with which we are familiar and them than there is between us and
the crawling amphibian which is our remote ancestor? Or between that and
the amoeba--the little swimming stomach from which it evolved? Or the
amoeba and the inert jelly of the Protobion?

"As for what Ventnor calls a group consciousness I would assume that
he means a communal intelligence such as that shown by the bees and the
ants--that in the case of the former Maeterlinck calls the 'Spirit
of the Hive.' It is shown in their groupings--just as the geometric
arrangement of those groupings shows also clearly their crystalline
intelligence.

"I submit that in their rapid coordination either for attack or movement
or work without apparent communication having passed between the units,
there is nothing more remarkable than the swarming of a hive of bees
where also without apparent communication just so many waxmakers,
nurses, honey-g