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
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