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occur side by side, but finally the sexual method superseded its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 the perfection
of mechanical appliances must ultimately supersede limbs; the
perfection of chemical devices, digestion; that such organs as hair,
external nose, teeth, ears, and chin were no longer essential parts of
the human being, and that the tendency of natural selection would lie
in the direction of their steady diminution through the coming ages.
The brain alone remained a cardinal necessity. Only one other part of
the body had a strong case for survival, and that was the hand,
teacher and agent of the brain. While the rest of the body dwindled,
the hands would grow larger.
There is many a true word written in jest, and here in the Martians we
have beyond dispute the actual accomplishment of such a suppression of
the animal side of the organism by the intelligence. To me it is quite
credible that the Martians may be descended from beings not unlike
ourselves, by a gradual development of brain and hands (the latter
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