An Inhabitant of the Planet Mars

by Henri de Parville

  Descartes’ speculative account of the origin of the solar system in Le monde was greatly elaborated by Pierre-Simon de Laplace in Exposition du système du monde [Exposition of the System of the World] (1798), which became the standard work to which Flammarion, Parville and other 19th century visionaries referred back. Descartes was not the only great philosopher to devote attention to the production of cosmic models—Immanuel Kant’s Allegemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels (1755; tr. as Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens) had already surpassed his work before Laplace took up the thread, and was more successful in its visionary anticipations—but Descartes had the greater literary influence, especially in his own country. Such planetary tours as Marie-Anne de Roumier’s Voyages de Milord Céton dans les sept planets [Voyages of Lord Seaton in the Seven Planets] (1765) took what scientific basis and justification they had from him and his followers.

  In the debate’s original theological context, it was taken for granted that, since God had made man in His own image and humankind was a key element in Creation, any other worlds that He had created must also be inhabited by human beings. The post-Copernican writers who began to vary this thesis initially did so very modestly, and primarily in one single respect: that of size. Nicholas Hill’s Philosophica Epicurea, Democritiana, Theophrastica [Epicurean, Democritian and Theophrastican Philosophy] (1606) argued that the size of created individuals must vary in proportion to the size of their worlds, and most later writers agreed. Giordano Bruno had already suggested that there might be some variety, without going into detail, as did Pierre Gassendi in his posthumously-published Syntagma Philosophicum [Collected Philosophical Writings] (1658). Cyrano de Bergerac took the idea further, albeit in a blatantly satirical spirit, but restricted himself to what was to become another common ploy: the notion that intelligent beings might be formed like Earthly animals, like those that had long featured in fables

  The German writer Otto von Guericke, writing in 1672, seems to have been the first to suggest that God’s infinite creative imagination might have disposed Him make to the population of other worlds infinitely variable as well as infinitely numerous. In France, the assumption that the intelligent inhabitants of other planets were likely to be human persisted throughout the 18th century, although Voltaire’s Micromégas (1752) was one of numerous works that made telling use of presumed differences in size, adding in differences in sensory perception for good measure. Parville not only clung hard to the notion that humans would arise almost everywhere, but attempted to build a new scientific explanation in support of the notion that the most significant variation between the human species of different worlds would be a mere matter of size.

  Parville’s theory of convergent evolution does leave room for the evolution of human species far beyond the stage currently represented on Earth, even though he refrains in his novel from offering any substantial suggestions as to what improvements future human species might embody. Although his original hoax article flirted with the introduction of some minor physical differences—most notably the trunk-like nose—he deliberately de-emphasized them in the expanded text. It was, in consequence, left to Flammarion, in the later dialogues in Lumen (first published in 1868-9) to grasp the full implications of the notion of evolutionary adaptation to physical circumstances and to begin—in spectacular fashion—the invention and depiction of authentically alien intelligences.

  In respect of the population of a plurality of worlds, Parville’s stereotypy was at the tail end of an old tradition, while Flammarion was at the head of a new one, but modern readers might judge that the retrospective credit balance is redressed by Parville’s careful avoidance of the embellishment of cosmic palingenesis. The notion that immortal souls might not be bound to their own worlds, being free to roam the vast post-Copernican plurality of worlds as their various hosts died, experiencing further incarnations on other worlds, had first been put forward by Huygens in Kosmotheoros, but was repopularized in France by Charles Bonnet in Contemplation de la nature [The Contemplation of Nature] (1764). It was quickly borrowed by Louis-Sébastien Mercier, a devotee of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the great pioneer of futuristic utopianism, who used it in his visionary short story “Nouvelles de la Lune” (1768; tr. in a Black Coat Press edition as “News from the Moon”) before Bonnet expanded and elaborated the thesis in Palingénésie philosophique [Philosophical Palingenesis] (1769). The idea was also taken up by two other enthusiastic followers of Rousseau: Nicholas Restif de la Bretonne, in the epistolatory novel Les posthumes (written 1788; published 1802); and Jacques Bernardin de Saint-Pierre—the author of the best-selling sentimental novel Paul et Virginie (1788)—in the philosophical treatise Harmonies de la Nature [Harmonies of Nature] (1815).

  It is conceivable, given Parville’s own strong interest in the idea of harmony in nature, that what put him off the idea of cosmic palingenesis was not its inherent implausibility so much as the political leanings of its followers. As a man who fancied himself an aristocrat, in spite of his humble origins, Parville was zealously right-wing in his political affiliations—most of the periodicals he wrote for were conservative—and he was certainly not an admirer of Rousseau’s radical disciples. This obviously did not prevent him from allowing the proudly Republican Hetzel to publish his work, but might nevertheless have tempered his eagerness to follow in the footsteps of writers who were so firmly associated with the left. (Humphry Davy, who had unashamedly introduced cosmic palingenesis into his own cosmic scheme, had been regarded in his earlier days as a key practitioner of what the disapproving English Tory press called “Jacobin science”, because he had a tendency to hang out with such dangerous revolutionary types as Joseph Priestley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey.) Whatever the reason, though, Parville turned out to have been wise in his avoidance of that particular imaginative recourse.

  Geology and Palaeontology in the mid-19th century

  It may be appropriate, in considering the historical context of Parville’s hoax, to add a brief prefatory comment on the contemporary state of geological and paleontological science in 1865. His own educational background was in geology, albeit geology of a practically-orientated sort, and he was obviously very familiar with the controversies that had long been raging in that science.

  Throughout the 18th century, the interpretation of record of the Earth’s past contained in rock strata had been interpreted within a catastrophist framework, which attributed the apparent pattern of change to periodical upheavals such as the Biblical Deluge and volcanic eruptions. This framework had been broadly accepted by the leading French geologist and palaeontologist of that century, the Comte du Buffon, whose Théorie de la terre (1749; tr. as The Theory of the Earth) and Époques de la nature (1778; tr. as Epochs of Nature) remained standard works in France. Parville’s references to ancient catastrophes in the text of Un habitant de la planète Mars and his use of terminology illustrate the extent to which Buffon’s ideas still permeated French thought, and his off-hand references to Charles Lyell seem symptomatic of a certain hostility to the English school of geology whose members believed that they had rendered catastrophism obsolete.

  The uniformitarian revolution in geological thought had been launched by the publication in 1795 of James Hutton’s Theory of the Earth, which proposed that the Earth had been slowly reshaped over a vast reach of time by the forces of erosion, deposition and consolidation. The idea was inevitably controversial because it made utter nonsense of the Bible-based chronology which, according to Archbishop James Ussher, famously set the date of the Earth’s creation in 4004 B.C. Although many previous geologists, including Buffon, had realized that the Earth must be far older than that, they had made their amendments piecemeal rather than wholesale, and relatively diplomatically; Buffon had been careful to keep the Biblical Deluge, even though he had reduced it to the status of one of a long series of transformative catastrophes extending over an unspecified time-span. The uniformitarian thesis represented a quali
tative rather than a merely quantitative shift in perspective.

  Hutton’s thesis was greatly elaborated and brought to a crucial maturity by Charles Lyell in Principles of Geology (1830), but Lyell’s work was regarded with a certain anxious suspicion in both Catholic France and Protestant America. Radical as their thinking was in other respects, Humphry Davy and Robert Hunt were both profoundly uneasy about the implications of uniformitarianism, and they both tried to affect a reconciliation of sorts between uniformitarian data and creationist faith, just as Parville does.

  The problematic status of fossils had become increasingly acute in the context of this geological controversy. The multiplicity and variety of known specimens increased by several orders of magnitude during the 18th century, and fossils played a major role in convincing Buffon and others that the world must be far older than Biblical theorists claimed. From the 1750s onwards, discoveries of giant fossil mammals became increasingly commonplace, especially discoveries of mastodon bones in America. Such finds provided abundant data for George Cuvier’s classic Recherches sur les ossements fossiles (1812; tr. as Researches on Fossil Bones), which set out the principles by which an entire skeleton might be hypothetically extrapolated from a relatively meager set of specimen bones—or, indeed, from a single bone. The manner in which Parville’s fictitious scientists attempt to extrapolate their relatively meager discoveries is in the Cuvier tradition, although they do not have occasion to use his actual method of reasoning.

  In the 1820s, the principal focus of paleontological attention shifted to much older, but equally gigantic, fossil reptiles excavated on Britain’s south coast, which prompted fiercely heated debates in London between Creationist naturalists and uniformitarian geologists. The term “dinosaur” was coined in 1841 by Richard Owen to assist in the classification of these new discoveries, although it had been partially anticipated in France by Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire’s Recherches sur des grands sauriens [Researches on Giant Saurians] (1831). The focus of attention switched again in the 1860s, however, when abundant specimens began to turn up in the American West, soon initiating a strong popular interest in fossil-collecting and fervent competition between rival “dinosaur hunters.” Although the fiercest and most notorious of the resultant feuds, between Edwin Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh, did not break out until 1873, the competition was already evident and newsworthy when Parville was inspired to concoct his hoax; it provided the backcloth against which “news” of a surprising fossil find in Colorado might seem plausible. The same popular interest in fossil reptiles had also played a major role in inspiring the underworld enclave featured in Jules Verne’s Voyage au centre de la Terre.

  In view of the significance of fossil finds to the context of plausibility in which his hoax appeared, it might seem odd that the attendees at Parville’s hypothetical conference have very little to say about the implications of actual fossils. Indeed, it is briefly noted at one point that their “old school” chairman, Mr. Newbold, is actively antipathetic to any mention of fossil humans of terrestrial origin; presumably, in spite of his name, he had conservative inclinations similar to Parville’s, and would not have approved of Verne’s decision to feature a giant humanoid alongside the much remoter relics conserved in Verne’s imaginary underworld. Parville is content to provide a theoretical reason why the animals of Earth’s remote past might have grown to lager sizes than those still extant, and avoids material that might have seemed contentious to his readers. It is possible that he was advised to proceed in this manner by Hetzel; indeed, Parville’s third letter gives the strong impression that he originally intended to make his fictitious scientific conference much more flamboyantly contentious that it turned out to be, and his book might have been far more exciting if he had. For whatever reason, though, he settled in the end for setting out views closely akin to his own, providing no substantial opposition save for a few relatively trivial and conscientiously polite objections. It is difficult to imagine things going so smoothly in any actual conference of the period in which deeply entrenched opinions were under threat.

  Postscript

  Interestingly—especially in view of what Mr. Wintow reveals in the final chapter of Parville’s book—it now appears that Parville’s was not the only hoax inspired by the fall of the Orgueil meteorite. In 1962, Bart Nagy re-examined the ample of the chondrite that had been sent to Chicago and found what he took to be microfossils within it. Having rushed news of the discovery into print, however, he was contradicted by other scientists who examined the specimen; S. L. VanLanrigham, C. N. Sun and W. C. Tan published analyses in Nature in 1963 and 1967 demonstrating the terrestrial origin of the seeds that Nagy had mistaken for fossils—a demonstration that as all the more newsworthy because the identification of the seeds also established the likelihood that the contamination had not been accidental. Although it is far too late to be sure, it seems probable that someone deliberately tampered with the Chicago specimen before it left France, intending contemporary scientists to “discover” the “fossils”.

  This tale acquired another twist a few years later, by which time it had been established that there really were meteorite fragments on Earth that had been dislodged from Mars by asteroid impacts, much as Mr. Owerght had suggested in Parville’s novel. In 2002, it was alleged that one of these “shergottite” meterorites, found in the Antarctic, gave the appearance of containing microfossils. Again subsequent examination by other scientists resulted in the claim being discounted as a hopeful illusion. By that time, alas, hardly anyone remembered Parville original hoax regarding a Martian meteorite, or his novel in which the meteorite turns out to contain miscroscopic animals capable of regeneration.

  There is, of course, a world of difference between microfossils and a mummy, but it is worth noting that Martian mummies also have a shadowy 20th century history, not merely in acknowledged works of fiction, but also in association with the orgy of speculation that followed the publication of a NASA photograph of a “face” on the Martian surface. Although the appearance was an accident, resulting from shadows cast by a rock formation, it gave rise to a flurry of supplementary “telescopic discoveries” similar to those once provoked at Percival Lowell’s Flagstaff observatory by the popularization of the notion that there were canals on Mars.

  Although most 20th century images of Martian mummies relate to fictitious mummies discovered on Mars, one spectacular exception is to be found in an exhibition mounted in Brussels in 2000, of specimens from the “forbidden collection” of the explorer Alexandre Humboldt-Fonteyne, exhumed from a private museum and organized for display by Michel de Spieglière. The high-point of the exhibition was a group of mummified Martians that Humboldt-Fonteyne had recovered from the Anasazi ruins in New Mexico—which are, as they saying has it, not a million miles away from James Peak, Colorado. Michel de Spieglière is, in fact, a pseudonymous artist, and the entire “Humboldt-Fonteyne exhibition”—including its extraordinarily elaborate guide-book to the life and discoveries of the imaginary explorer—was a cleverly-compiled, magnificently-detailed and artistically-brilliant hoax.

  Although Parville’s article and book, along with their subsequent echoes, must still be judged to constitute contradictory evidence with respect to the common claim that truth is stranger than fiction, this subsequent history certainly emphasizes the fact that the relationship between the two is more intricate, and more ironic, than is sometimes appreciated.

  Notes

  1 James Peak is in Gilpin County, Colorado. Parville has “Arrapahys” rather than Arapaho, the former being a French version used in some early 19th century reference books.

  2 Parville: “So-called because it is the first in which traces of organisms are discovered.”

  3 Parville: “A mineral of variable color, formed of silica, magnesium, calcium carbonate and ferrous oxide.”

  4 Parville: “A variety of rock formed of feldspar and silica, calcium carbonate, magnesium, iron oxides and manganese.”


  5 The famous Martian “canali” (channels) had yet to be “discovered” in 1864, so there is no mention of them in the account of the planet given here.

  6 Charles Lyell (1797-1875) had recently published The Antiquity of Man (1863), the latest in a series of works that played a central role in establishing a “uniformitarian” geology, which took it as proven that the Earth and its natural species were very ancient, the surface of the Earth and its inhabitant species having evolved very slowly. His work was one of the foundation-stones on which Darwin’s theory of the origin of species by natural selection rested. Had he ever arrived at Paxton House, the discussions there would certainly have become more contentious.

  7 Leopold von Buch (1771-1853) and Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) were German scientists, the former a noted geologist and he latter a philosophically-inclined naturalist whose Kosmos was a significant attempt to offer a comprehensive physical description of the world as it was understood by science in the early 19th century.

  8 Urbain Le Verrier (1811-1877) is universally credited as the discoverer of Neptune, having calculated its ostensible position in 1846 from observed discrepancies in Neptune’s orbit; the British astronomer John Couch Adams performed a similar calculation almost simultaneously, but got it slightly wrong. Johann Galle and Heinrich d’Arrest of the Berlin Observatory were the first people actually to observe the planet by means of a telescope, a few days after Le Verrier’s calculation told them where to look. Le Verrier went on to “discover” the planet Vulcan by calculations based on perturbations of Mercury’s orbit; numerous astronomers “confirmed” his determination with false sightings, but the “discovery,” like many other errors of the era, was subsequently effaced from the reference books.