Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/764

 744 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

achievements of the most advanced races, great as they may seem when compared with pre-scientific ages, are really trifling when looked at from the standpoint of possibilities.

Everyone has seen a map of the surface of the planet Mars with its wonderful canals. Schiaparelli was perfectly right in saying that they indicate the action of intelligent beings. The chief objection to this view is the gigantic scale on which these works are projected. It is said that man has never undertaken anything so colossal. The comparatively trifling task of cutting a channel large enough for ships to pass through the narrow Isthmus of Panama has well-nigh baffled his powers. What can be thought of a scheme of making a whole continent a network of great rivers many miles in width? Without pretending to any knowl- edge of areography, and without expressing any opinion as to the nature of the Martian canals, I will merely use this as an illustration of the possibilities of an intelligent being occupying a planet for a sufficiently prolonged period. If these canals really represent gigantic engineering operations, their magnitude is no obstacle to our understanding them. Mars, from his posi- tion in the solar system, is many million years older than the earth. Assuming that he has had an approximately parallel experience with that of the earth, his Tertiary period began ages earlier than ours. If the intelligent being, whatever its physical form, was developed there at the same relative date as man, that being has been in existence millions of years longer than man. The age of race differentiation need not have been longer than that of man. All the rest of that vast period has been passed in race integration and whatever followed this. We may sup- pose that an era of science was evolved there as here and at approximately the same stage in the history of the species. But that era has lasted thousands of times as long as has ours. Man has only just begun the conquest of nature. We may suppose that in Mars the conquest of nature is complete, and that every law and every force of nature has been discovered and utilized. Under such conditions there would seem to be scarcely any limit to the power of the being possessing this knowledge to transform the planet and adapt it to its needs.