one was discussing. Now, don't be deceived by nonsensical talk
about living beings in other planets. There are no such creatures.
It's a pure delusion of the ordinary egotistical human pattern.
When people chatter about life in other worlds, they don't mean
life--which, of a sort, there may be there:--they mean human life--
a very different and much less important matter. Well, how could
there possibly be human beings, or anything like them, in other
stars or planets? The conditions are too complex, too peculiar, too
exclusively mundane. We are things of this world, and of this world
only. Don't let's magnify our importance: we're not the whole
universe. Our race is essentially a development from a particular
type of monkey-like animal--the Andropithecus of the Upper Uganda
eocene. This monkey-like animal itself, again, is the product of
special antecedent causes, filling a particular place in a
particular tertiary fauna and flora, and impossible even in the
fauna and flora of our own earth and our own tropics before the
evolution of those succulent fruits and grain-like seeds, for
feeding on which it was specially adapted. Without edible fruits,
in short, there could be no monkey; and without monkeys there could
be no man."

"But mayn't there be edible fruits in the other planets?" Frida
inquired, half-timidly, more to bring out this novel aspect of
Bertram's knowledge than really to argue with him; for she dearly
loved to hear his views of things, they were so fresh and
unconventional.

"Edible fruits? Yes, possibly; and animals or something more or
less like animals to feed upon them. But even if there are such,
which planetoscopists doubt, they must be very different creatures