them sluggishly performing the most elaborately complicated operations
together without either sound or gesture. Their peculiar hooting
invariably preceded feeding; it had no modulation, and was, I believe,
in no sense a signal, but merely the expiration of air preparatory to
the suctional operation. I have a certain claim to at least an
elementary knowledge of psychology, and in this matter I am
convinced as firmly as I am convinced of anything that the Martians
interchanged thoughts without any physical intermediation. And I have
been convinced of this in spite of strong preconceptions. Before the
Martian invasion, as an occasional reader here or there may remember, I
had written with some little vehemence against the telepathic theory.
The Martians wore no clothing. Their conceptions of ornament and
decorum were necessarily different from ours; and not only were they
evidently much less sensible of changes of temperature than we are, but
changes of pressure do not seem to have affected their health at all
seriously. Yet though they wore no clothing, it was in the other
artificial additions to their bodily resources that their great
superiority over man lay. We men, with our bicycles and road-skates,
our Lilienthal soaring-machines, our guns and sticks and so forth, are
just in the beginning of the evolution that the Martians have worked
out. They have become practically mere brains, wearing different bodies
according to their needs just as men wear suits of clothes and take a
bicycle in a hurry or an umbrella in the wet. And of their appliances,
perhaps nothing is more wonderful to a man than the curious fact that
what is the dominant feature of almost all human devices in mechanism
is absent the _wheel_ is absent; among all the things they brought to
earth there is no trace or suggestion of their use of wheels. One would
have at least expected it in locomotion. And in this connection it is
curious to remark that even on this earth Nature has never hit upon the
wheel, or has preferred other expedients to its development. And not
only did the Martians either not know of (which is incredible), or
abstain from, the wheel, but in their apparatus singularly little use
is made of the fixed pivot or relatively fixed pivot, with circular
motions thereabout confined to one plane. Almost all the joints of the
machinery present a complicated system of sliding parts moving over
small but beautifully curved friction bearings. And while upon this
matter of detail, it is remarkable that the long leverages of their
machines are in most cases actuated by a sort of sham musculature of
the disks in an elastic sheath; these disks become polarised and drawn
114