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Taking such a region as New England, where all the earth is life-bearing in the summer season, and where the glacial period of the winter continues but for a short time, we find that here and there on the high mountains the snow endures throughout most of the summer, but that all parts of the surface have a season when life springs into activity.
I could not imagine what he meant by this, although it occurred to me that it was a pleasant thing to have him speak good, plain English; but the other circumstances were so entirely novel that, instead of opening the conversation with some conventional remark, like a sensible person, I burst out with: "But Proctor says Mars has passed its life-bearing period."
Beyond lay the blue heights of Dartmoor. And over all, bathing us as it passed, moved the wind, the life-bearing spirit of the whole, the servant of the sun. The old woman stood beside me, silently enjoying my enjoyment, with a still smile that seemed to say in kindly triumph, "Was I not right about the tower and the wind that dwells among its pinnacles?"
Nearly all men agree to the assertion. Practically all men, even while demanding their selfish rights as superior males, tacitly agree to the fact of the sacred life-bearing priority of woman. Tacitly, they yield the worship to that which is female. Tacitly, they conspire to agree that all that is productive, all that is fine and sensitive and most essentially noble, is woman.
"Now we all know this is the way the story runs that the moon was once inhabited by a highly intelligent race. They tell us it is a cold, dead world now, not at all fit for inhabitants. But that is because its day is passed. Being so much smaller than the earth it cooled off quicker, and its life-bearing period long since found its end.
But all this has been left unnoticed by those who have argued in support of the Brewsterian doctrine of a plurality of worlds. Or else they reason as though it had been proved that the relatively short life-bearing periods in the existence of the several planets must of necessity synchronise, instead of all the probabilities lying overwhelmingly the other way.
At first blush the demonstration that all the worlds known to us are composed of the same matter, subject to the same general laws, and probably passing through kindred stages of evolution and decay, would seem to carry with it the reasonable presumption that to all primary planets, such as ours, a similar life-bearing stage must come.
We know that planets, or rather, speaking more generally, the orbs which people space, pass through various stages of development, during some only of which they can reasonably be regarded as the abode of life or supporting life; yet the eager champion of the theory of many worlds will have them all in these life-bearing or life-supporting stages, none in any of the stages of preparation, none in any of the stages of decrepitude or death.
Thus, contemplating a tree which they supposed to be like their own in its nature, they might say, 'Yonder is a tree system crowded with fruits, each the abode of many myriads of creatures like ourselves: whereas in reality the tree might be utterly unlike their own, might not yet have reached or might long since have passed the fruit-bearing stage, might when in that stage bear fruit utterly unlike any they could even imagine, and each such fruit during its brief life-bearing condition might be inhabited by living beings utterly unlike any creatures they could conceive.
Even the saline springs of Canada and the Northern States of America, where the wapiti love to congregate, and the noble hunter lurks in the thicket to murder them unperceived, derive their saltness, as an able Canadian geologist has shown, from the thinly scattered salts still retained among the sediments of that very archaic sea whose precipitates form the earliest known life-bearing rocks.
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