We had been conversing more than an hour, during which time the rain had not ceased falling, when Mr. Uwins asked Mr. Midith about the Marsian theory of creation and formation. We were all intensely eager to hear Mr. Midith’s explanation; even little Celestine’s curiosity was so aroused by the unassuming, clear, forcible style and manner of Mr. Midith that her countenance wore a more than usual bright and pleasing aspect.
“I will tell you, ladies and gentlemen,” said Mr. Midith. “As far as I have been able to learn during the ten years I have lived on earth, the fundamental laws of nature, as I have said before, are the same on earth as they are on Mars. The only difference is, that Mars is further advanced astronomically and geologically. Mars is older and has had longer time for development. Dynamics, life, thought, society, and industry are much better understood by the masses on Mars than they are understood by the multitude here. Science is further advanced. With these preliminary remarks I shall give you as nearly as I can, the desired information; and I hope that you will not feel backward in asking any questions that may suggest themselves to your minds while I am endeavoring to give you an explanation of the foundation upon which all knowledge must be built. You can see from the nature of the question which you ask me that it requires quite an elaborate elucidation. All growth and change that has ever taken place in the universe is based on this question—the question of growth and development.
“Respecting the origin of man and the formation of the universe, two theories or doctrines were long current with the Marsites. One, the scientific doctrine of evolution, which is founded on the principle of growth and change, governed by fixed laws. The other, the theological doctrine of ‘special creation’ which is founded on revelation. The doctrine of evolution assumes that the universe has slowly, through the lapse of millions of ages, been evolved from previously existing matter by continuous integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion, and that man gradually and slowly evolved from lower organisms, and has attained his present form and mental endowments by the influence of his environment, personal and ancestral. It teaches that man, as a whole, has been, and is still continually rising in the scale of existence. It is, therefore, also an encouraging and cheerful belief.
“The long antiquated doctrine of ‘special creation’ assumed that the universe was created out of ‘nothing’ by an external agency; that man was created perfect out of clay, somewhat after the fashion that a potter makes an earthern vessel, and that he fell from his state of perfection to what we now find him. This was a discouraging, a gloomy belief, which, if continued, must eventually end in total degradation.”
“What evidence suggested the theory of evolution to the Marsites?” asked Mrs. Uwins.
“Let us briefly consider a few of them,” continued Mr. Midith.
“A good farmer always reserves the best of his crops for seed. This is artificial selection; that is, the best and fittest is artificially reserved by man for seed, which is to produce the next year’s crop. A stockbreeder reserves the largest, strongest, fleetest and most symmetrical individuals to propagate the race.
“The horticulturist selects seed from the choicest flowers and fruit. You see all this is selection, but not natural selection; it is artificial, as you call it, because it is done by man. Man aids nature, so to speak; but nature unaided makes just such selection during the lapse of long ages. In the plant and animal kingdoms, especially in the lower orders millions must perish in order to give room and opportunity for a few to live. As long as muscle, and not reason, is the most advantageous weapon in the struggle for existence, the strongest, toughest, fleetest and fiercest ones survive and reproduce the race, and in this manner the superior qualities of the parents are continually transmitted and added to, in the offspring.
“Organs develop by healthful use and become rudimentary by disuse. The blacksmith’s arm becomes strong by constant healthful use. The eyes of moles became rudimentary by disuse. The crabs and fishes in the Mammoth Cave have lost their eyes entirely by disuse, but the sockets remain as rudimentary remnants. If we should keep the right arm constantly out of use, and do all our work with the left, that is, beginning at childhood, there would be a perceptible difference in the size and function of the two arms in one generation; and, if this practice were continued for thousands of generations, use, disuse and heredity would no doubt aid in bringing about a vast inequality between the active and inactive arms.
“There are vast transformations taking place before our own eyes, on earth the same as on Mars, which are wonderful proofs of evolution. For instance, the frog begins life as a fish and then lungs displace gills. Butterflies, bees and beetles of all kinds start out as grubs and undergo wonderful transformations.
“Embryonic (pertaining to the rudiments of an undeveloped plant or animal) growth furnishes one of the strongest, as well as the most startling proofs of evolution. Each individual passes through all the successive stages which have preceded in the line of its tribal history.
“In morphological structure, convincing proofs of evolution are found. We find fossil remains of animals that have gradually developed in size from a fox to your modern horse.
“Geologists have partially examined the Marsian crust to a certain depth, the same as you have examined the earth’s crust, but more minutely and more thoroughly. Fossils (animal and vegetable remains imbedded in the rock formation of the earth’s crust) of various kinds are found in this rock formation composing the crust. Remains of the most lowly organized plants and animals are found in the lowest strata, and as we ascend the fossils become more and more complex. And the present generation of organic beings living on the surface of Mars, or on the surface of the earth, are more complex and more highly developed than any fossil remains that have ever been buried on the respective planets.
“The preceding consideration shows that the fossils testify to the fact that there has been a slow, but gradual development during the almost immeasurable eons of time that were required for the formation of these sedimentary strata that contain the precious ‘Revolution written by the finger of Time on the Rock of Ages, and by the ink of Death.’”
“What a long, long time must have been required to produce such changes as you speak of. Have you any idea, Mr. Midith, how long the Marsian crust was in forming?” asked Viola.
“It is not finished yet,” said Mr. Midith. “It is still forming the same as ever. The crust is growing thicker every moment by internal cooling and by external accretion of meteoric dust, etc., and fossils of the present time are now being buried the same as they were during all preceding geologic ages.
“Let us, in a few thoughts, endeavor to travel back from the present to that primitive time, when nature imbedded the first organic remains in the then forming strata. The proportion of water area to the land was much greater then than it is at present. There were no high mountains, because the solid crust was thin, and the doubling or folding up of a thin crust can not produce a high fold, or mountain, and, therefore, the Marsian crust, or surface, was at this primitive beginning not so much diversified by mountains and depressions as it is at present. It was more nearly spherical, and hence all, or nearly all, covered with water; and what applies to Mars’ crust undoubtedly applies, under similar conditions, equally to the surface of all other planets.
“Igneous rocks, as you know, are produced by the gradual cooling of the heated matter of a planet, moon, or sun. They are formed next to the internal fire, and can, therefore, contain no fossils. Before fossils could be imbedded, igneous rocks had to be slowly disintegrated by the action of heat and cold, wind and wave, rain and drought, and other atmospheric phenomena. Clay, soil, sand, etc., is nothing but a pulverized igneous rock.
“After the solid igneous rock gradually became pulverized, the wind, rain, tide, flood and current had to carry this pulverized igneous rock, or sand, into the lowest ocean and river beds, where the process of forming sedimentary (deposited by water), fossiliferous, stratified rock began.
“Here we can clearly see, then, how the remains of perished plants and animals have been imbedded from time to time in this slowly forming sedimentary rock. The fossils of the lower strata are the simplest; those nearest the surface, or the most recently formed, the most complex. The modern wrecked steamer will be a fossil of the future, the same as the entombed skeleton of antiquity, or the imbedded canoe of primitive man, are fossils of the present. The fossils, then, are one of the strongest proofs of evolution. They indicate a slow but gradual development of plant and animal life; and as time passes, both here and on Mars, more and more new links, which bind all things into a grand whole, imperceptible gradations of development, are being discovered.
“Such, then, are some of the most conspicuous signs which undoubtedly suggested and strengthened, at every step of advance, the evolution theory; and also correspondingly weakened and discredited the ‘special creation’ theory.”
“I have never before taken any stock in evolution,” said Rev. Dudley, “but I must acknowledge that the testimonies cited by you are very strong; we see them daily transpiring before our eyes right here on earth. But allow me to ask you, Mr. Midith, what is your theory of the fathomless abyss of the starry heavens? I think that part of the question is not so easily handled as that which treats of the formation of a planet’s crust.”
“I have so far considered evolution only as affecting the Marsian and earth’s crusts, and the organic beings living upon them. I endeavored to make the elucidation as clear as possible by beginning at the nearest, simplest and most conspicuous evidences. But let us bear in mind that our earth and Mars are only little nooks, insignificant motes as compared with the visible universe. We are convinced now that evolution holds good in the formation and dissolution of heavenly bodies as well as in the formation of planets’ crusts, and in the development of organic beings. The planets with their attendant moons are little solar systems, so to speak, with their moons revolving around them, which were detached from the planets millions of ages ago. Saturn has eight moons and an unbroken ring. The sun has planets revolving around him, the same as the moons revolve around the planets, and our whole solar system revolves around a center with incredible velocity. From moon to planet, from planet to sun, from sun to Galaxy we may travel in our imagination and rest on the ultimate axiom—the ‘persistence of force.’
“We have no reason to believe that there is a gap or break anywhere in the operation of the so-called nature. No one can tell precisely where the human leaves off and the animal begins; where the animal leaves off and the vegetable begins; where the organic leaves off and the inorganic begins. There is a gradual development from the simple to the complex, from the lower to the higher, from the inferior to the superior, from the ignorant to the intelligent, from the cruel to the gentle; a gradual merging or gradation from one into the other; the transition at any one point is so slight that it is imperceptible to the human eye. Allow me to say that there never was a first human being, no more than there was a first threshing machine. The mouth of the animal was a very primitive threshing machine; then the mouth and paws together; then the hand; then the flail, then the hand-thresher; then the horse-power, and now the steam-thresher; thus we see that there never was a first thresher, nor was it ever made, but gradually developed and improved to its present structure and capacity; so, too, with man. The lower organism out of which man, through the lapse of countless ages, evolved, gradually grew more and more human like from the effects of intercourse with his environment; and this process is still going on. Man is not finished yet. The same forces that have brought him from his primitively low plane to his present relatively high one are elevating him still higher. So we see that man was not created, but is still being created, evolved; and so with all else.
“According to what you call the ‘nebular hypothesis,’ the earth once filled the entire orbit of the moon. The matter composing the earth was then in a rare, highly-heated state, revolving around the sun, from which it was detached and rotated on its axis, which caused the detachment of the matter out of which the moon was formed.
“The number of atoms composing the earth, as well as the number of atoms composing the entire solar system, was practically the same then as it is now. Heat, which is the repellent force, kept the atoms and molecules so far apart that the matter composing the earth formed a sphere of nebulous matter, filling the entire orbit of the moon. In like manner did the sun once fill the entire orbit of the earth, and at a preceding time the entire orbit of Neptune.
“But some time before this, the earth was even larger than the orbit of the moon. The nebulous matter now composing the earth and the moon, which are now two separate bodies, was once all in the same sphere. By the gradual radiation of heat, the volume, but not the mass, diminished, and the axial rotation increased until a broad concentric ring detached itself. The impulse of the moon’s revolutionary motion was given by the earth’s rotation on its axis.
“All plastic bodies, like a planet, etc., assume a spherical form, because all particles equally distant from the center are equally attracted toward the center; and a sphere is the only ‘solid’ in which these conditions can be fulfilled. A sphere formed from the breaking up and concentrating of a broad concentric ring, like the rings out of which planets and moons are formed, must necessarily rotate on its axis, because the particles which compose the concentric ring had an unequal revolutionary velocity. Those particles of the ring nearest the center had a less angular velocity than those particles farthest away from the center.
“Just as these few bodies constituting our solar system of which I have spoken were and are affected, so, we believe, have been or will all heavenly bodies—moons, planets, suns and stars—in all parts of the universe be affected during the lapse of untold ages.
“From this brief explanation, you will readily see that the Marsites’ conception of creation and your evolution theory are almost exactly identical. Observation and experience have led the Marsites and the mundane inhabitants to similar beliefs on these points of creation and formation.
“It is getting late, and I fear that I shall be intruding on our time which should be assigned for rest and sleep,” said Mr. Midith. “I believe, as we have learned in our native home, that we ought to cultivate regular habits and try to live up to them.”
“Mr. Midith, I think you are just an excellent teacher!” exclaimed little Celestine. “You must surely stop with us while you are in our town. I am going to ask you ever so many more questions about your books, animals, towns, playmates and a thousand other things.”
“Yes, Mr. Midith,” said Rev. Dudley; “if you consider all those things wrong and cruel that you mentioned to us some time ago, I shall be much pleased to know how you get along without them, and how you got rid of them if you once had them like you now find them here.”
“To do without them is much more simple than to have them, as you shall see further on,” replied Mr. Midith. “Of course, we passed through all the stages of physical and intellectual evolution that you have passed through and are now in, and we have also gone much farther than you have thus far. At one time our social and industrial system was afflicted with all your present evils and cruelty. We were in succession cannibals, savages, semi-civilized and are now what we call civilized. What we will be next we can not tell.”