There are plenty of opportunities for instruction in social matters available for those who know how to use them; but even the best lectures are not of much practical use to the inexperienced worker. She wants guidance in the daily difficulties which beset her; she wants guidance even as to the lectures which she should attend and the books which she should study. This it should be the aim of the Settlement to give her. There she will meet with those with whom she can freely talk over her difficulties, with whom she can discuss the social questions she is studying. Settlements have done a great work and may hope to do still more in the future, in training workers, and in raising the standard of the voluntary work done by women for the community.

Amongst the residents in our Settlements there are women who work in C.O.S. offices or serve as school managers or guardians of the poor. The existence of a Settlement makes it possible for them to live near their work and so to have more time to devote to it. Their experience is of great help to those other residents who are merely engaged in parochial work. Again, a Settlement gathers round it many who are only able to come for the day, and are glad to find a place where they can have rest and refreshment between their visiting or their classes. They too will be glad of the guidance and sympathy that they will receive from the residents in the Settlement.

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Much should also be done by a Settlement in studying the social conditions of the neighbourhood in which it is situated. All our social workers should consider themselves to be students, and should learn how to observe and how to record the result of their observations for the good of others. Much has been done in this way by existing Settlements-Mr. Charles Booth calls them centres of research and their help has often been asked and gladly given in special investigations. It should be a regular part of their ordinary work to train the residents in habits of research, and each Settlement should adopt some method of recording the results of the work and observations of its residents.

The advantages of a Settlement seem so obvious that it would have been unnecessary to enlarge upon them had it not been for the attack made upon the Settlement idea by Mr. Free. He confines his attack specially to Church Settlements; but surely the Church cannot afford to neglect the help which Settlements may give to the overwhelming work which she is called upon to do in the crowded parishes of London and our large cities. Mr. Free quotes an anonymous letter-writer who says The ladies set all law and order at defiance; worry the vicar with notices and requests of all kinds; pauperise and demoralise the people.' We should all agree that such ladies would be a curse to any neighbourhood. Fortunately, we have not met them, and do not know where to find them. Again, Mr. Free seems to object specially to the fact that residents in a Settlement are

celibates, and fears that the Settlement system may exalt celibacy at the expense of the married life.' It is as difficult to see any reason for this fear as it is to see how the Church at the present day could do without the devoted labours of unmarried women.

Of course the work done by any Settlement must depend upon the character of its residents as well as, to some extent at least, upon the sympathy and encouragement it meets with from others. There is sure to be much imperfect work, there are certain to be many mistakes, but it seems as if there were a place at present in our Church and social work which can be better filled by a Settlement than by any other organisation. Many women are living in Settlements in different parts of London, working on quietly and steadily day by day, seeking no glory or notoriety for their work, finding their happiness in humble service, ready to help where their help is needed. We can do with the work of many more such. There is room for the ablest women, there is use for the noblest gifts. Work such as the Settlements are doing has surely done much in past years to help us to understand one another, to promote the sense of brotherhood, the realisation of the common life. I cannot do better than quote in conclusion the words in which a far greater authority than myself, and one who is not given to unmeasured words, speaks of the work of Settlements. Mr. Charles Booth says that they

are a success, if only because they have widened out the idea and given new form to the practice of neighbourliness, and have thus made for social solidarity

raze them from London, and London would be noticeably the poorer they are more practical than isolated effort; and, in spite of the drawbacks of community life and the artificialities and partial separation from ordinary social life which are involved, they give scope for the very effective concentration of many minds on one general aim. Their stability in the future depends on the amount of personal service they can secure of the kind that is needed... it is to be hoped that the means as well as the men and women may be forthcoming, for the conditions of London life will call for their presence in many districts for many years to come.1

Where the need is so great, there is room for service of many kinds. Nothing is so pitiable as that any time or energy should be wasted in contention. Each may surely find enough to do without pausing to attack or hinder others.

LOUISE CREIGHTON.

'Life and Labour in London, Summary, p. 381.

VOL, LXIII-No. 374

SS

ARE THERE MEN IN OTHER WORLDS?

ALTHOUGH the question as to whether there are, elsewhere in the universe, beings sufficiently like ourselves to be called human, must for ever remain an open one, it is well worth discussing, because it leads us to consider matters of great interest to every thoughtful person and well worth the attention of students of science.

Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace, in his recent book, Man's Place in the Universe, gives a negative answer; while Professor Simon Newcomb is inclined to admit the possibility on the ground that, among the millions of stars now revealed to our telescopes, there may be some which afford their accompanying planets conditions sufficiently like those of our earth to enable human-like beings to flourish. In the present article I propose to debate the matter rather from the point of view of the biologist than from that of the physicist or the astronomer, and shall endeavour to show that, judged from what we find in him, man is literally of the earth, earthy. An examination into his past history proves that he is adapted, with the most minute precision, to his own proper sphere; and that in all his parts, mental and bodily, he is as much a product of the complex conditions of life on this planet as the features of a bronze image are a product of its mould. It will be seen that, looking at the question from this standpoint, even if we grant all Professor Newcomb's millions of planetary systems, the probabilities are overwhelming against the existence of men and women in any other world.

Popular speculations as to the nature of the supposed inhabitants of Mars, which crop up whenever Martian discoveries are announced from Flagstaff Observatory and elsewhere, may here be alluded to in passing. Whatever the presumed Martians may be like, it would certainly be impossible for us, if we met one of them, to recognise him as a man and a brother. Beings who can perform gigantic labours, such as the digging of 'canals' compared with which the Mississippi is a mere gutter, with not more than one-eighth of our atmosphere to breathe meanwhile, must have a chest development which would distort them out of all semblance to humanity; while the low force of gravity in Mars would enable people of average weight to get about on legs not much stouter than those of a collie dog.

According to some careful observers, such as Professor Campbell of the Lick Observatory, it is even an open question whether Mars has any more atmosphere than the moon. More than this, certain leading physicists quoted by Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace, have declared that no oxygen, hydrogen, or water could exist on so small a world without being dissipated into space and sucked up by ourselves and the sun. Hence it has been suggested that the 'polar snow caps' of Mars may consist of solid carbonic acid gas. From this point of view our Martian neighbours must subsist upon an atmospheric regimen of carbonic acid instead of upon one of air, and hence would be more likely to resemble trees in their physical constitution than the higher animals. Such a notion opens up an inviting field for imaginative writers who wish to rival Mr. H. G. Wells. Here below we irrigate and cultivate passive and helpless vegetables. There, perhaps, an alert and enterprising vegetable population is watering and fertilising the soil on its own initiative and for its own private ends.

If we trace man's pedigree up from the lowest organisms to his present state, we find that there must have been, on innumerable occasions, a dividing of the ways, in which conditions absolutely peculiar to this planet determined the issue as to which path should lead upwards to humanity.

The items of environment which have directed the plastic lifestream along this or that evolutionary channel were often as inconsiderable and as fortuitous as the utterly trivial events which, in everyday life, fatally determine our future. There is this difference, however. A man has his innate will-power (or what amounts to the same thing), which enables him in some measure to assent or to resist, while the life-stream under the changing gusts of environment is as smoke wafted by the wind. Often in threading life's numberless cross-roads the main procession of living things goes one way, ending nowhere in particular, while a few individuals drift off through some casual influence along an obscure by-path, which, in the end, proves the only track leading upwards to the goal. Such influences, however, are ordained and limited all the time by certain physical conditions proper to our own planet. Gravity, air-pressure, temperature, moisture, and light are only a few of these. If we took account of them all, and of their interdependence one upon another, and took into account also the innumerable phases and tendencies of complex organic life, even Newcomb's millions of stars would be nowhere in balancing the chances against the evolution of man elsewhere in the universe. Let us look at a few of these controlling circumstances and conditions, remembering all the time that they are but samples of continuous happenings throughout millions of years. We may be guided in the sampling process by keeping in mind the main divisions among living things as they are classified to-day.

Very early indeed some of the primitive forms divided into

those that drew oxygen from the air, and those that drew carbonic acid. Such as took the latter course shut themselves off for ever from all earthly chances of becoming active and versatile beings of the nature of man. Oddly enough, however, as I hope to show by and by, this dependence on atmospheric carbonic acid on the part of the chlorophyll-bearing and light-seeking vegetable world has contributed more than anything else to certain forces of environment which have given to man his most distinctive characteristics in the shape of clever hands and a calculating, reasoning brain.

•

Then consider the division which early took place into vertebrate and invertebrate. The invertebrate portion of creation long took precedence on the earth, and even to-day some of its representatives are, in a sense, much more highly developed, both physically and socially, than is the branch to which we belong. Most wonderful and elaborate in their exact adjustment to environment are the present life-schemes of many of the spiders, bees, and ants; and, moreover, geologists assert that these creatures had reached their present perfection long before man took precedence upon the earth. Yet it can be demonstrated that, in dispensing with a backbone, their early progenitors took a fatal step as far as the higher possibilities of life were concerned. I think it was Professor Lloyd Morgan who, in a lecture for juveniles, distinguished vertebrates from invertebrates by saying that the former were made of 'flesh and bone,' and the latter of skin and squash.' By depending too much upon their skins as a protection and support for their organs, the invertebrates, with exception of the molluscs, handicapped themselves fatally as regards progress to higher grades of being. They are literally hide-bound, and when they desire to grow large, like certain crabs and lobsters, they are obliged periodically to burst off their outer covering—which, it must be remembered, is also the scaffolding upon which their muscles are hung—and remain long in a dormant state before the new skin is ready for service. It is as if we were, every few months, deprived of all our bones, and had to lie in bed a long time before we could resume our active habits. This would handicap us fatally as regards getting on in the world. By far the greater number of the invertebrates have avoided such troubles by remaining small, and contenting themselves with a span of life of merely a few months' duration. They overcome the growth difficulty by adopting several distinct stages or transformations, and finally are born from their pupa as fully equipped adults. Such habits bar them from progress in several ways. In the first place you cannot possibly have much intelligence without a big store of brain cells—and brain cells take up room. The old idea that the tiny ganglia in the fore-end of an ant are almost equal in thinking capacity to a human brain has become a mere fairy tale to the modern biologist.

Moreover, such creatures have, in their economy of life, one fatal