ould
suppose the formation of their world to correspond with the beginning of
time, and the formation of their race to have followed the formation of
their world by but a few seconds. They would conclude that a Supreme
Being had fashioned their world and themselves by special creative acts,
and that what they saw outside their fruit world had been also specially
created, doubtless to subserve their wants.

Let us now imagine that gradually, by becoming more closely observant
than they had been, by combining together to make more complete
observations, and above all by preserving the records of observations
made by successive generations, these creatures began to obtain clearer
ideas respecting their world and the surrounding regions of space. They
would find evidence that the fruit on which they lived had not been
formed precisely as they knew it, but had undergone processes of
development. The distressing discovery would be made that this
development could not possibly have taken place in a few seconds, but
must have required many hours, nay, even several of those enormous
periods called by us days.

This, however, would only be the beginning of their troubles. Gradually
the more advanced thinkers and the closest observers would perceive that
not only had their world undergone processes of development, but that
its entire mass had been formed by such processes--that in fact it had
not been created at all, in the sense in which they had understood the
word, but had _grown_. This would be very dreadful to these creatures,
because they would not readily be able to dispossess their minds of the
notion that they were the most important beings in the universe, their
domain of space coextensive with the universe, the duration of their
world coextensive with time.

But passing over the difficulties thus arising, and the persecution and
abuse to which those would be subjected who maintained the dangerous
doctrine that their fruit home had been developed, not created, let us
consider how these creatures would regard the question of other worlds
than their own. At first they would naturally be unwilling to admit the
possibility that other worlds as important as their own could exist. But
if after a time they found reason to believe that their world was only
one of several belonging to a certain tree system, the idea would occur
to them, and would gradually come to be regarded as something more than
probable, that those other f