orm, for there's no life in the desert. There must be
heat up to a certain point, and not above or below it, for fire kills,
and there's no life at the poles (as among Alpine glaciers), or what
little there is depends upon the intervention of other life wafted
from elsewhere--from the lands or seas, in fact, where it can really
originate. In order to have life at all, as WE know it at least (and I
can't say whether anything else could be fairly called life by any true
analogy, until I've seen and examined it), you must have carbon, and
oxygen, and hydrogen, and nitrogen, and many other things, under certain
fixed conditions; you must have liquid water, not steam or ice: you must
have a certain restricted range of temperature, neither very much higher
nor very much lower than the average of the tropics. Now, look, even
with all these conditions fulfilled, how diverse is life on this earth
itself, the one place we really know--varying as much as from the oak to
the cuttle-fish, from the palm to the tiger, from man to the fern, the
sea-weed, or the jelly-speck. Every one of these creatures is a complex
result of very complex conditions, among which you must never forget
to reckon the previous existence and interaction of all the antecedent
ones. Is it probable, then, even a priori, that if life or anything like
it exists on any other planet, it would exist in forms at all as near
our own as a buttercup is to a human being, or a sea-anemone is to a cat
or a pine-tree?"

"Well, it doesn't look likely, now you come to put it so," Frida
answered thoughtfully: for, though English, she was not wholly
impervious to logic.

"Likely? Of course not," Bertram went on with conviction.
"Planetoscopists are agreed upon it. And above all, why should one
suppose the living organisms or their analogues, if any such there are,
in the planets or fixed stars, possess any such purely human and animal
faculties as thought and reason? That's just like our common human
narrowness. If we were oaks, I suppose, we would only interest ourselves
in the question whether acorns existed in Mars and Saturn." He paused
a moment; then he added in an afterthought: "No, Frida; you may be sure
all human beings, you and I alike, and thousands of others a great deal
more different, are essential products of this one wee planet, and of
particular times and circumstances in its history. We differ only as
birth and circumstances have made us differ. There IS a mys