Wellsian

"THE RULING INHABITANTS

And now we are in a better position to consider those ruling inhabitants who made the giant canal system of Mars, those creatures of human or superhuman intelligence, who, unless Mr. Lowell is no more than a fantastic visionary, have taken Mars in hand to rule and order and cultivate systematically and completely, as I believe some day man will take this earth. Clearly these ruling beings will have been evolved out of some species or other of those mammal-like animals, just as man has been evolved from among the land animals of this globe. Perhaps they will have exterminated all those other forms of animal life as man is said to be exterminated all the other forms of animal life here. I have written above of floods and swamps and jungles to which life has adapted itself, but perhaps that stage is over now upon Mars altogether. It must have been a long a life-molding stage, but now it may be at an end. Mr. Lowell, judging by the uniform and orderly succession of what he calls the “fallow” brown and then then of the blueish green tints upon the low-lying areas of Mars, is inclined to thing that this is the case and that all the fertile area of the planet has been reclaimed from nature and is under cultivation.

HOW LIKE TERRESTRIAL HUMANITY?

How far are these beings likely to resemble terrestrial humanity?

There are certain features in which they are likely to resemble us The quasi-mammalian origin as we have supposed for them implies a quasi-human appearance. They will probably have heads and eyes and backboned bodies, and since they must have big brains, because of their high intelligence, and since all creatures with big brains tend to have them forward in their heads near their eyes, these Martians will probably have big shapely skulls. But they will in all likelihood be larger in size than humanity, two and two-thirds times the mass of man’s, perhaps. That does not mean, however, that they will be two-thirds times as tall, but allowing for the laxer texture of things on Mars, it may be that they will be half as tall again when standing up. And as likely as not they will be covered in feathers or fur. I do not know, I do not know if anyone knows, why man, unlike the generality of mammals, is a bare-skinned animal. I can find, however, no necessary reason to make me believe the Martians are bare-skinned.

Will they stand up or go on four legs or six? I know of no means of answering that question with any certainty. But there are considerations that point to the Martian’s being a biped. There seems to be a general advantage in a land-going animal having four legs; it is the prevailing pattern on earth, and even among the insects there is often a tendency to suppress one pair of the six legs and use only four for going. However, this condition is by no means universal. A multitude of types, like the squirrel, the rat, and the monkey, can be found which tend to use the hind legs chiefly for walking and to sit up and handle things with the fore limbs. Such species tend to be exceptionally intelligent. There can be no doubt of the immense part the development of the hand has plays in education of the human intelligence. So that it would be quite natural to imagine the Martians as big-headed, deep-chested bipeds, grotesquely caricaturing humanity with arms and hands.

But that is only one of several almost equally plausible possibilities. One thing we may rely upon: the Martians must have some prehensile organ, primarily because the development of intelligence is almost unthinkable without it, and, secondly, because no other way could they get their engineering done. It is stranger to out imaginations, but no less reasonable, to suppose, instead of a hand, an elephant-like proboscis, or a group of tentacles or proboscis-like organs. Nature has limitless imagination, never repeats itself exactly, and perhaps, after all, the chances lie in the direction to the greater unlikeness to the human shape than these forms I have ventured to suggest.

How wild and extravagant all this reads! One tries to picture feather-covered men nine or ten feet tall, with proboscises and several feet, and one feels a kind of disgust of the imagination. Yet wild and extravagant as these dim visions of unseen creatures may seem, it is logic and ascertained fact that forces us toward the belief that some such creatures are living now. And, after all has the reader ever looked at a cow and tried to imagine how it would feel to come upon such a creature with its knobs and horns and queer projections for the first time?”

Original illustration by Leigh here: media.tumblr.com/15c606d4f6b92…