The War of the Worlds NT, Wisdom Ancient
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The War of the Worlds
H. G. Wells
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The War of the Worlds
But who shall dwell in these worlds if they be
inhabited? . . . Are we or they Lords of the World? . . .
And how are all things made for man?—
KEPLER (quoted in The Anatomy of Melancholy)
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BOOK ONE
THE COMING OF THE
MARTIANS
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CHAPTER ONE
THE EVE OF THE WAR
No one would have believed in the last years of the
nineteenth century that this world was being watched
keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and
yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves
about their various concerns they were scrutinised and
studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a
microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that
swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite
complacency men went to and fro over this globe about
their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire
over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the
microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the
older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or
thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them
as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some
of the mental habits of those departed days. At most
terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon
Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to
welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of
space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of
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the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and
unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and
slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early
in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.
The planet Mars, I scarcely need remind the reader,
revolves about the sun at a mean distance of 140,000,000
miles, and the light and heat it receives from the sun is
barely half of that received by this world. It must be, if the
nebular hypothesis has any truth, older than our world;
and long before this earth ceased to be molten, life upon
its surface must have begun its course. The fact that it is
scarcely one seventh of the volume of the earth must have
accelerated its cooling to the temperature at which life
could begin. It has air and water and all that is necessary
for the support of animated existence.
Yet so vain is man, and so blinded by his vanity, that
no writer, up to the very end of the nineteenth century, ex-
pressed any idea that intelligent life might have developed
there far, or indeed at all, beyond its earthly level. Nor
was it generally understood that since Mars is older than
our earth, with scarcely a quarter of the superficial area
and remoter from the sun, it necessarily follows that it is
not only more distant from time’s beginning but nearer its
end.
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