to be dark globes of a size comparable with that of the earth
itself, they were made the habitations of beings like unto
ourselves.

The trend of modern discovery has been against carrying this view
to its extreme, as will be presently shown. Before considering the
difficulties in the way of accepting it to the widest extent, let
us enter upon some preliminary considerations as to the origin and
prevalence of life, so far as we have any sound basis to go upon.

A generation ago the origin of life upon our planet was one of the
great mysteries of science. All the facts brought out by
investigation into the past history of our earth seemed to show,
with hardly the possibility of a doubt, that there was a time when
it was a fiery mass, no more capable of serving as the abode of a
living being than the interior of a Bessemer steel furnace. There
must therefore have been, within a certain period, a beginning of
life upon its surface. But, so far as investigation had gone--
indeed, so far as it has gone to the present time--no life has
been found to originate of itself. The living germ seems to be
necessary to the beginning of any living form. Whence, then, came
the first germ? Many of our readers may remember a suggestion by
Sir William Thomson, now Lord Kelvin, made twenty or thirty years
ago, that life may have been brought to our planet by the falling
of a meteor from space. This does not, however, solve the
difficulty--indeed, it would only make it greater. It still
leaves open the question how life began on the meteor; and
granting this, why it was not destroyed by the heat generated as
the meteor passed through the air. The popular view that life
began through a special act of creative power seemed to be almost