The morning news. [volume] (Savannah, Ga.) 1887-1900, 1896-12-06
POPULATION OF THE STARS.
If There Are Beings on Mars They
Have Queer Lungs.

Have Queer Lungs.
From the London Spectator.
The discovery of the philosophers stone,
supposing that phrase to imply working
scheme for transmitting an inferior metal
into gold, would probably produce moth
ing beyond a period of terrible economic
confusion, or perhaps vast and disas-
trous, because over-rapid, transfer of
property, but the attainment of certainty
that sentient beings with corporal en-
easements, acting by effort and not by
pure volition, existed in any one other
planet, would only enlarge the range of
human thought and the force of the hui
man imagination. Such a certainty would
either increase to an extraordinary de-
gree the reverence for the Crea tor-for
we are all so limited that we reverence
powers which we see exerted more than
powers which we know in theory must ex-
st-or would compel materialists to revise
and widen their whole theory of the re-
lation of matter to mind, it being evident
that sentence could exist under condi-
lions hitherto deemed impossible.
There are certainly millions, and posi-
bly, billions, of worlds of which no two
are the same, and if sent:ent beings were
found past question in one other world
than ours, the presumption that they ex-
listed under variety of conditions and
probably. therefore, in variety of forms
practically unlimited would become so
violent that to reject the theory would
soon be regarded as an evidence of a fool
ish, popular habit of disbelief in the I'M
seen. Man has some internal dislikes to
believe that limited beings with sentence
can exist under conditions other than his
haE
world without air is a dead world, or at
all events an empty world yet there is
no proof that the ether, which we know
to be everywhere, cannot support life, or
that circumstances of which we know
nothing may not modify either it's intol-
cradle cold or the effect of that cold.
In Mars itself there is some potency at
work which, to the despair for the moment
OF terrestrial science, produces warmth
where cold ought to reign permanently su-
preme. 1t is as certain as any deduction
from analogy can be that air in Mars,
though 1t exists, is as rarelied as it would
be at the top of a mountain twice as high
as Mount Everest and that consequently
the normal and permanent degree of cold
ought to be terrible.
THE thermal income of Mars is less
than half that of the earth and its theo-
retical mean temperature is consequently
taking into account its low 'albedo' or
reflective power per unit of area--thirty
degrees centrigrade below freezing" Yet
the actual climate of Mars is mild Snow
certainly melts rapidly-that is patent to
the telescope--vapor certainly rises-that
is clear from the spectrum analysis-water
flows and there are indications. II not
proofs that a sudden vegetation follows
the sudden thawing of the snow What
warns the air is unknown. but 1t is warm
ed past all question or doubt and all argu-
ments, therefore, as to the inevitableness
of cold in other worlds must be pronounced
imperfect. as are also those which show the
impossibility Of sustaining corporeal life.
All we can say with certainty is that If
sentient beings with corporeal frames ex-
list in Mars the relation of the lungs to
the body cannot be Identical with their
relation in man, which, as we are aware
OF fishes, is not an impossible exercise OF
the imagination.