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by that distinguished anatomist, Professor Howes, the hands. Even as I saw
these Martians for the first time they seemed to be endeavouring to raise
themselves on these hands, but of course, with the increased weight of
terrestrial conditions, this was impossible. There is reason to suppose that
on Mars they may have progressed upon them with some facility.
The internal anatomy, I may remark here, as dissection has since shown, was
almost equally simple. The greater part of the structure was the brain,
sending enormous nerves to the eyes, ear, and tactile tentacles. Besides this
were the bulky lungs, into which the mouth opened, and the heart and its
vessels. The pulmonary distress caused by the denser atmosphere and greater
gravitational attraction was only too evident in the convulsive movements of
the outer skin.
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And this was the sum of the Martian organs. Strange as it may seem to a human
being, all the complex apparatus of digestion, which makes up the bulk of our
bodies, did not exist in the Martians. They were heads merely heads. Entrails
they had none. They did not eat, much less digest. Instead, they took the
fresh, living blood of other creatures, and injected it into their own veins.
I have myself seen this being done, as I shall mention in its place. But,
squeamish as I may seem, I cannot bring myself to describe what I could not
endure even to continue watching. Let it suffice to say, blood obtained from a
still living animal, in most cases from a human being, was run directly by
means of a little pipette into the recipient canal....
The bare idea of this is no doubt horribly repulsive to us, but at the same
time I think that we should remember how repulsive our carnivorous habits
would seem to an intelligent rabbit.
The physiological advantages of the practice of injection are undeniable, if
one thinks of the tremendous waste of human time and energy occasioned by
eating and the digestive process. Our bodies are half made up of glands and
tubes and organs, occupied in turning heterogeneous food into blood. The
digestive processes and their reaction upon the nervous system sap our
strength and colour our minds. Men go happy or miserable as they have healthy
or unhealthy livers, or sound gastric glands. But the Martians were lifted
above all these organic fluctuations of mood and emotion.
Their undeniable preference for men as their source of nourishment is partly
explained by the nature of the remains of the victims they had brought with
them as provisions from Mars. These creatures, to judge from the shrivelled
remains that have fallen into human hands, were bipeds with flimsy, silicious
skeletons (almost like those of the silicious sponges) and feeble musculature,
standing about six feet high and having round, erect heads, and large eyes in
flinty sockets. Two or three of these seem to have been brought in each
cylinder, and all were killed before earth was reached. It was just as well
for them, for the mere attempt to stand upright upon our planet would have
broken every bone in their bodies.
And while I am engaged in this description, I may add in this place certain
further details which, although they were not all evident to us at the time,
will enable the reader who is unacquainted with them to form a clearer picture
of these offensive creatures.
In three other points their physiology differed strangely from ours. Their
organisms did not sleep, any more than the heart of man sleeps. Since they had
no extensive muscular mechanism to recuperate, that periodical extinction was
unknown to them. They had little or no sense of fatigue, it would seem. On
earth they could never have moved without effort, yet even to the last they
kept in action. In twenty-four hours they did twenty-four hours of work, as
even on earth is perhaps the case with the ants.
In the next place, wonderful as it seems in a sexual world, the Martians were
absolutely without sex, and therefore without any of the tumultuous emotions
that arise from that difference among men. A young Martian, there can now be
no dispute, was really born upon earth during the war, and it was found
attached to its parent, partially budded off, just as young lilybulbs bud off,
or like the young animals in the fresh-water polyp.
In man, in all the higher terrestrial animals, such a method of increase has
disappeared; but even on this earth it was certainly the primitive method.
Among the lower animals, up even to those first cousins of the vertebrated
animals, the Tunicates, the two processes occur side by side, but finally the
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sexual method superseded its competitor altogether. On Mars, however, just the
reverse has apparently been the case.
It is worthy of remark that a certain speculative writer of quasi-scientific
repute, writing long before the Martian invasion, did forecast for man a final
structure not unlike the actual Martian condition. His prophecy, I remember,
appeared in November or December, 1893, in a long-defunct publication, the
Pall Mall Budget, and I recall a caricature of it in a pre-Martian periodical
called Punch. He pointed out -- writing in a foolish, facetious tone -- that [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]