An Inhabitant of the Planet Mars

by Henri de Parville

  “Sir,” says Stek, “your winglets would bear away an elephant even more effectively. You and your mouse have solved the great problem of directing balloons. It’s now no more than a question of technology; the scientific solution is found. Sit down again.”

  “I think so, Mr. Stek, but, a few minutes afterwards, as I went in search of another mouse and another roundabout to repeat the experiment, I heard a loud whistling noise; a little black mass fell a few meters away from me, and I had no difficulty recognizing my first mouse and my first roundabout. The mouse was dead and the winglets in pieces.”

  “Time is precious, sir, and life is short. Your system is extremely ingenious, and I tell you that you could lift an elephant with it. Don’t worry about the rest. It’s a technological question. It’s no longer a matter for scientists, but for technologists and workmen. Persist in your work and come back to seek my advice when you have succeeded.”

  The visitor withdraws, enlightened with respect to his system, and makes his way forward as best he can, guided by his host and perfectly convinced that disorder is order. That’s Stek.

  I forgot to say that he only receives visitors on Sundays. He was won great renown by means his originality, and there is no more popular man in America. If someone says to someone else, “Stek will be here imminently,” you can be sure of finding them waiting patiently several hours later.

  I do not know whether I should pass in review over the whole audience; I fear that I might bore you. It might be better to select a few more of the most notable and most loquacious among them, in order that you will be able to follow the debate. All the other members are arranged around and in front of the conference-table, including Mr. Haughton, professor of paleontology at Boston; Mr. Liesse, professor of geology at Albany; Mr. Saunter, director of the Nashville Institute; Mr. Ziegler, president of the Richmond Academy; Mr. Sawton, holder of the chair of chemistry at Indianapolis; Mr. Murchison, member of the geological section of the Washington Institute; Mr. Oupeau, the chief of medicine at Baltimore Hospital; Messrs. Skrimpton, Liess, White, Millon and Karter of the Academy of Saint Louis; Mr. Owerght, professor of astrophysics at Richmond; Mr. Sawen, engineer and chief of naval construction at Annapolis; Mr. G. Mitchell, highly distinguished anatomist of Frankfurt; Messrs. Saunters, Cayley, Merit and Bug, artillery officers; Mr. Sieman, professor of chemistry and quantitative analysis at the Washington Mining School; Mr. Logan, assistant astronomer at Petersburg; Mr. O’Clintock, examiner in physics at the Mining School; Mr. Larrab, editor of the Washington Journal of Agriculture; Mr. Richardson, engineer in the establishment of Filox & Son; Mr. Engelhard, professor of cosmography at Springfield; Monsieur l’Abbé Amaurose, a French missionary resident in Nashville for ten years; Mr. Gouge, member of the London Geological Society; Mr. Evans, professor of mathematics at Indianapolis, and, finally, your most humble servant.

  LETTER IV

  Setting the scene. The following. The journalists. William Seringuier. Abbé Omnish. Williamson. On the difficult of beginning at the beginning. Discussion. The infinitely small and the infinitely large. Molecular astronomy. What matter is. The diabolical dance of all that surrounds us. Lilliputian stars. Two hundred and fifty thousand years to count how many stars might be enclosed in the head of a pin. The harmony of the universe.

  We are numerous, as you see, and we still have behind us the correspondents of our principal newspapers. William Seringuier has made the trip, in spite of his legendary laziness. Abbé Omnish, incontrovertibly our premier popularizer of science, is at his post—as are A. Williamson, the pretentious writer for the Washington Strand, and Noirot de Sauw, a physician out of Molière,15 resurrected in the 19th century.

  A few more biographical comments, and I shall bring this overly long scene-setting to a conclusion.

  I ought, in fact, to tell you that Haughton, whose name I put at the head of the list, passes for one of the leading paleontologists of our era. He is still quite young and, in stark contrast to Stek, never goes out without his stick in his hand and his hand in a well-tailored glove. His tight frame indicates a former military man; I believe that he once saw active service. He is very benevolent, it is said, or, at any rate, very indulgent, perhaps a little too devoted to rose-water in spite of his military bearing. He was the man who, while introducing one of the leaden works of William Seringuier to the Boston Academy two years ago, cried out in a moment of comic eloquence: “Finally, what more can I say to the Academy? The author, with his customary skill, has contrived to draw all the thorns out of science, to leave nothing but the roses.”

  The phrase has become historic, and, when anyone wants to point out Mr. Haughton, they never fail to say “the paleontologist of the thorn-less roses”. It is a fact that Mr. Haughton is a gentleman in every sense of the word.

  Who else should I describe for you? Liesse, the Albany professor and mining engineer, elected two years ago to the Academy is tall and thin. He has done a lot of work on metamorphism16—as has his colleague, the engineer Vanbrée, who, less fortunate than him, is still waiting for a chair. Liesse has made aeroliths his academic specialism; he was one of the first to get here. Oupeau, a physician from Baltimore, is recognizable in every country in the world by his white cravat, which rises up above his ears, and the stiffness of his torso. He is not an orator, it must be said. Owerght, professor of astrophysics at Richmond, is a friend of the astronomer Greenwight and a fine mathematician.

  I should stop there; I’ll never get to the end of the list, and my paper is visible shrinking. I shall offer further descriptions, if the opportunity arises, as the discussion continues.

  It was on Thursday June 22 that the commission held its first session—and what a session it was! Opened at 1 p.m., it did not close until 7 p.m.. All that I got out of it is one fact perfectly demonstrated: that there is nothing so difficult as to begin at the beginning. That was the matter of determining who should speak and how the progress of the discussion should be regulated. Newbold covered himself in sweat with the effort of ringing his hand-bell, and his hands came together and separated again like the crank-shaft of a steam-engine.

  Should we begin by discussing the possibility of celestial bodies falling to Earth?—a primarily astronomical question, on which Greenwight was particularly insistent. Should we not first devote ourselves, on the contrary, to the examination of the mummy from the viewpoint of physics or physiology? Would it not be preferable to examine the subject from the viewpoint of chemistry? And the hand-bell rings, and Messrs Wintow and Rink raise their voices; Messrs. Sawton, Davis and Murchison thump their fists on the green serge; Mr. Stek closes his eyes; Newbold tries to speak; William Seringuier shouts at the top of his voice that Newbold has no common sense, and that, if he were doing his job, silence would soon be re-established. What a racket! You would scarcely get an idea of it by recalling the heyday of your parliamentary debates.

  Eventually, Greenwight ends up claiming the floor.

  “Gentlemen,” he says, “it seems to me that the debate is going astray and that neither astronomy, nor anthropology, nor physiology should take the first step. Everything should be taken in order. Now, first of all, what are we dealing with? An aerolith. So, the floor reverts by right and in fact to geologists and chemists. Once that point is clarified, I think that it will be appropriate to see from what sector of the sky this mass has come to us, if it is not of terrestrial origin; that will be the concern of the astronomers and physicists; finally, it will be the turn of the physiologists, paleontologists, etc. Hazard, moreover, gentlemen, has shown us the way. Have we not chosen a geologist as our president, an astronomer as vice-president and a zoologist and an anthropologist as secretaries?”

  “Mr. Greenwight seems to me to be right,” says Newbold, “and if the commission has no objection to it, I shall set the day’s agenda thus: geological discussion; astronomical discussion; anthropological discussion.”

  No one demands to speak.

  There is a prolonged ring of the
hand-bell. “The resolution is adopted,” murmurs the president, and puts his hands together.

  The floor is given to Mr. Paxton first, and then to Mr. Davis. They recount in full detail the various incidents in the discovery of the aerolith, which you already know.

  Mr. Davis then reports the analyses that he has made of the bolide’s surface. Mr. Paxton, who has repeated them, reports his own findings. The agreement is almost perfect.

  Mr. Sieman, professor of quantitative analysis at the Mining School, short, mocking and extremely skeptical: “Can Mr. Sawton tell me whether he is perfectly sure that the presence of cesium has been established? The analysis reports traces. How was it carried out? I beg pardon for insisting, but the commission will perhaps recall that I have already fund cesium, two years ago, in several mineral species: aphanite, nickelocher, triphylite, panabase and bournonite,17 and this matter is therefore of direct interest to me.”

  Mr. Sawton: “I simply used a spectroscope, and the characteristic ray was present in the spectra of almost all the specimens placed in the flame.”

  Mr. Sieman: “You did not find any substance foreign to the Earth?”

  Mr. Sawton: “No.”

  Mr. Davis: “I should add that certain crystals, those of silver, for example, do not have the same form that they do here. I found crystalline silver that was no longer in the octahedral form but organized in prismatic squares.”

  The President: “Mr. Davis saw the bolide when it was still enclosed in the ground. Were the strata horizontal?”

  Mr. Davis: “No, Mr. President; inclined about thirty-three degrees north-west. For me, there is not the slightest doubt that the aerolith fell in a remote geological epoch, for almost exactly the same inclination was observable in its principal axis. It was most certainly in place when the Cordillera lifted up the neighboring strata as it was elevated.”

  Mr. Newbold: “I should point out to Mr. Davis that above the carboniferous layer there is a deposit varying in depth by between one and three meters. That deposit is not diluvian, and on a map that I drew myself—not for this circumstance, of course—it is designated as loose or landslide terrain. It comes from the soil of virgin forests. Is it that layer whose inclination Mr. Davis has measured? If so, the datum is worthless.”

  Mr. Davis: “That layer had been stripped away then I arrived, and I could, of course, only make my initial measurements on the ancient deposits.”

  Mr. Wintow: “You did not recognize any trace of human bones in that superior layer, or any worked flint?”

  Mr. Paxton: “In an excavation a little further away to the north-west, I found a mass of stone arrow-heads and what I believe to be aurochs bones—but the arrow-heads were porphyry, not flint.”

  Mr. Rink: “I should like to see these objects, Mr. Paxton. The Institut de France is very interested in these questions. Monsieur de Quatrefages 18 will be delighted if we send him a few specimens. Mr. Lyell, for his part, will receive with interest any details that you care to give him.”

  The President: “Gentlemen, our sessions are overburdened. Permit me to bring you back to the question. The first point to elucidate is this: is the rocky mass discovered by Mr. Paxton really an aerolith? I think that no one is in doubt that its composition and position in the strata seem to prove that it is. For myself, I do not think that any other rock presenting its specific characteristics has ever been found on Earth.”

  Mr. Haughton: “The geologist of the thorns supports the opinion of the President as to the evidence.”

  Mr. Liesse, the mining engineer, asks to make an observation. “I think,” he says, “that an authentic bolide has indeed been exposed—but, in order to put our conclusion beyond the shadow of a doubt, it appears to me to be important to see whether any other rocks analogous to it in composition can be found in the vicinity in the same rock-formation. Might we not hypothesize, in fact, that it was produced in a certain epoch of concretion, or in a rain of materials of a composition identical to that of the aerolith? We have examples of geodes or crystallizations that are completely different, in substantial composition, from the surrounding terrain.”

  Mr. Rink: “We can only gain from doing what Mr. Liesse asks, but, in my view, the question is settled. The thick black glaze that surrounds the mass indicates traces of fusion, and the rock can only have been cracked in consequence of a long passage through the atmosphere at an enormous velocity. Its origin is therefore extraterrestrial.”

  The President: “I shall put the proposition to the vote. Will those in favor of adopting it raise their hands.”

  A large number of hands go up. The proposition is adopted.

  Mr. Vanbrée: “I should like to make the observation to the commission that, although the opinion that it has just expressed does not imply anything about the true origin of the mummy, it is no less important from the point of view of planetary composition. It is a bolide, so it comes from space; its composition, therefore, is that of the celestial bodies; thus, according to the analyses carried out, the elements of other worlds must be very nearly those of the Earth; throughout our solar system we shall find the same rocks and the same metals, in different crystalline forms.

  “This is, as everyone understands, a big step forward. If the constituent elements of worlds are the same, it is permissible to deduce that our entire solar system has a common origin. I do not insist; I only wish to draw the attention of geologists and astronomers to this point.”

  Mr. Murchison: “It is a pure and simple confirmation of the theories of Laplace,19 which make our planet and the Sun the debris and fragments of a large primitive nebula.”

  Mr. Owerght: “Evidently, but whether we had found the same substances or whether we had found different ones, it would not be possible to conclude anything in consequence, for all matter is characterized by the grouping of its elements and the juxtaposition of its molecules. Now, that juxtaposition depends on temperature, and on the rapidity with which changes in temperature occur. Thus, as the temperature of each heavenly body has varied abruptly or differently, there will be as many causes of transformations of matter, and as many origins of different substances.”

  Mr. O’Clintock. “I tend to agree with my honorable colleague’s opinion. It appears to me to be quite certain, according to present scientific knowledge, that bodies only differ by virtue of their molecular grouping, as constellations of the heavens are distinguishable by the positioning of stars. Take any two or three cities; seen from a balloon at a great height, they scarcely differ, but a little closer to the ground, their appearance changes, solely because of the arrangement of houses and the topographical distribution of streets, promenades and edifices.

  “Such is the case for a mineral or any other substance. Since natural forces will have placed the streets, promenades and houses of these little molecular cities in such and such a manner, you will get a different impression. Everything depends on the architect, in this case the influence of the predominant force.”

  Mr. Sieman: “I approve unreservedly of my savant colleagues’ way of seeing, and, if the commission will authorize me to hold the floor for a few minutes...”

  (“Yes, yes!”)

  “…I will add that personal endeavors developing the view of American and foreign mathematicians permit me to advance the hypothesis that any body whatsoever represents, very exactly and in miniature, an entire stellar system like the one that we perceive in the sky every night: the Milky Way. The astronomers who are kind enough to be listening to me know better than I do that the Earth is a molecule among all those innumerable heavenly bodies, whose ensemble appears to our eyes as a long white streak.

  “The Earth is an integral part of the Milky Way. Well, a body, whatever it might be—think, for the sake of focusing the mind, of wood, gold, or diamond—is nothing but a mass of variously-grouped molecular constellations. From the large to the small, the analogy is complete. Our eyes are not equipped to perceive the worlds in these infinitely tiny systems in every detail, bu
t might not other animals better constituted than we are be able to perceive them? It is obvious that, if you could construct a microscope of sufficient power, you would succeed in magnifying the molecular worlds of each petty terrestrial Milky Way, as one magnifies and refines the nebulosity of the heavens with telescopes. Take a glance; you will then see what appears to be a confused mass arranged with an admirable symmetry.20

  “The bodies will be pierced by light; you will discover enormous interstices, empty spaces, like the interplanetary spaces. Then, from place to place, worlds harmoniously grouped, with atmospheres around each one, and—a marvelous spectacle!—all these little molecular worlds rotating with a vertiginous rapidity, describing more or less oblique trajectories, like the large worlds in the sky. Then, by further augmenting the power of your instrument, you will end up seeing other small worlds around each of these principal worlds, satellites like our Moon, carrying out their rotational movements majestically and regularly: the infinitely small is so infinitely large!

  “All these movements are so rapid that they are ungraspable by human beings—but they are sufficient, nevertheless, to have an effect on us! And what strange effects! Heat and light, gentlemen—for whose true causes we did not know where to look for a long time, but which we have now discovered!

  “These infinitely rapid movements impact upon us; they affect us. Directly? No. These little worlds are masses so tiny that they produce no more effect on us than the grains of sand that flew through the air at Voltaire’s Micromégas 21—but these little worlds, which swarm in cadence in their intermolecular medium, discover there an atmosphere whose mass is of the same order as they are; they agitate that atmosphere; they give birth to ripples there as a stone thrown into a pond produces concentric circles, and these undulations, repeated with a frequency of 400 billions, or even 1000 billions, per second, spread out to impact upon us and to disturb the movement of other stars that form the framework of our bodies. If these impacts increase their velocity of translation or rotation, we feel a sensation of heat; if, on the other hand, the constellations of our bodies were animated with more rapid movements, these shocks would make us lose speed, and we would experience a sensation of cold.