e appears, apart from
its water vapor, to have no sort of analogy with our own. And in the
solar spectrum itself, many of the lines have not yet been identified
with terrestrial substances.

The interrelation of the planets is of course incontrovertible, since
they are all children of the same parent. But they differ among
themselves, not merely in respect of situation, position, volume, mass,
density, temperature, atmosphere, but again in physical and chemical
constitution. And the point we would now accent is that this diversity
should not be regarded as an obstacle to the manifestations of life,
but, on the contrary, as a new field open to the infinite fecundity of
the universal mother.

When our thoughts take wing, not only to our neighbors, Moon, Venus,
Mars, Jupiter, or Saturn, but still more toward the myriads of unknown
worlds that gravitate round the suns disseminated in space, we have no
plausible reason for imagining that the inhabitants of these other
worlds of Heaven resemble us in any way, whether in form, or even in
organic substance.

The substance of the terrestrial human body is due to the elements of
our planet, and notably to carbon. The terrestrial human form derives
from the ancestral animal forms to which it has gradually raised itself
by the continuous progress of the transformation of species. To us it
seems obvious that we are man or woman, because we have a head, a heart,
lungs, two legs, two arms, and so on. Nothing is less a matter of
course. That we are constituted as we are, is simply the result of our
pro-simian ancestors having also had a head, a heart, lungs, legs, and
arms--less elegant than your own, it is true, Madam, but still of the
same anatomy. And more and more, by the progress of paleontology, we are
delving down to the origin of beings. As certain as it is that the bird
derives from the reptile by a process of organic evolution, so certain
is it that terrestrial Humanity represents the topmost branches of the
huge genealogical tree, whereof all the limbs are brothers, and the
roots of which are plunged into the very rudiments of the most
elementary and primitive organisms.

The multitude of worlds is surely peopled by every imaginable and
unimaginable form. Terrestrial man is endowed with five senses, or
perhaps it is better to say six. Why should Nature stop at this point?
Why, for instance, may she not have given to certain beings an
electrical sense, a magnetic sense,