uropeans call married to him. But let that pass. If one went on pulling
oneself up short at every one of your customs, one'd never get any
further in any question one was discussing. Now, don't be deceived by
nonsensical talk about living beings in other planets. There are no
such creatures. It's a pure delusion of the ordinary egotistical human
pattern. When people chatter about life in other worlds, they don't mean
life--which, of a sort, there may be there:--they mean human life--a
very different and much less important matter. Well, how could there
possibly be human beings, or anything like them, in other stars or
planets? The conditions are too complex, too peculiar, too exclusively
mundane. We are things of this world, and of this world only. Don't
let's magnify our importance: we're not the whole universe. Our race
is essentially a development from a particular type of monkey-like
animal--the Andropithecus of the Upper Uganda eocene. This monkey-like
animal itself, again, is the product of special antecedent causes,
filling a particular place in a particular tertiary fauna and flora,
and impossible even in the fauna and flora of our own earth and our own
tropics before the evolution of those succulent fruits and grain-like
seeds, for feeding on which it was specially adapted. Without edible
fruits, in short, there could be no monkey; and without monkeys there
could be no man."

"But mayn't there be edible fruits in the other planets?" Frida
inquired, half-timidly, more to bring out this novel aspect of Bertram's
knowledge than really to argue with him; for she dearly loved to hear
his views of things, they were so fresh and unconventional.

"Edible fruits? Yes, possibly; and animals or something more or less
like animals to feed upon them. But even if there are such, which
planetoscopists doubt, they must be very different creatures in form
and function from any we know on this one small world of ours. For just
consider, Frida, what we mean by life. We mean a set of simultaneous
and consecutive changes going on in a complex mass of organised carbon
compounds. When most people say 'life,' however,--especially here with
you, where education is undeveloped--they aren't thinking of life in
general at all (which is mainly vegetable), but only of animal and often
indeed of human life. Well, then, consider, even on this planet itself,
how special are the conditions that make life possible. There must be
water in some f