The Day After Death; Or, Our Future Life According to Science (New Edition)

by Louis Figuier

The other planets must have been formed by the same process as the earth. They were, no doubt, composed of a collection of gas and vapours, which became liquid, pasty, and eventually solid, by a process of refrigeration. This process, taking effect especially upon their surface, they began to put forth a skin, or exterior and solid covering, which was the soil of the planet. On this resisting soil fell the liquids resulting from the condensation of the water vapour, and thus the first seas of the planets were formed.

We would remind those who doubt the correctness of this theory that the poles of the globe of Saturn and that of Jupiter are much more flat than those of the Earth; which is explained by the greater velocity of the rotation of each upon its axis. Our days are 24 hours long, whereas those of Jupiter and Saturn are only 10 hours. Greater rapidity of rotation produces a correspondingly increased depression at the extremities of the axis. This geometrical result demonstrates the justice of the assimilation in their respective origin which we maintain between the Earth and the other planets.

In the warm waters of the basin of the seas the first living beings which existed upon our globe appeared. Animal life commenced in the waters, in the primitive forms of zoophytes and mollusca, as we know, because zoophytes and mollusca, with the addition of a few articulates, composed the animal remains found in the transition strata which come after the primary formations. The first vegetables are found in the same transition strata, they are mosses, algæ, and ferns.

When the earth had become somewhat cooler, phanerogamous vegetables appeared upon the continents. Numerous vegetable species were simultaneously created, for the flora of the secondary formations is extremely rich and varied.

It was the same in the case of animals. So the zoophytes, mollusca, and fish which existed in the transition period succeeded reptiles, in the secondary formation, which inhabited both land and sea. At this period appeared those monstrous saurian reptiles, whose formidable shapes, and colossal dimensions fill us with surprise and almost with dismay. Then the gigantic mosasaurus ravaged the seas, the terrible ichthyosaurus spread terror among the inhabitants of the waters, and the gigantic iguanodon laid waste the forests. The secondary formation, which is filled with their remains, shows us that at that period reptiles held the first rank in creation.

At a later date, the atmosphere having become purer, birds began to traverse the air. In the tertiary deposit we find the remains of several kinds of birds, and these remains, which do not exist in the earlier formations, sufficiently prove that it was in the tertiary period that birds made their first appearance upon the terrestrial globe.

Still later, at a more advanced period of the tertiary epoch, mammifers appear upon the scene. We must observe that these animal species do not replace each other, that the one does not exclude the other. Several of the ancient animal species continue to exist after the appearance of entirely novel kinds. We might quote as instances whole groups of animals, such as the lingulæ (mollusca), the coral (zoophyte) among animals, and among vegetables, the algæ, ferns, and lycopodes, which appeared on our globe in the earliest period of the reign of organization, and have never ceased to exist. It was not until the last epoch in the history of the Earth, during the quaternary epoch, that man appeared, the highest product of living creation, the ultimate term of organic, intellectual, and moral progress, the crowning upon our earth of the visible edifice of nature.

At present, man lives together with the animals which began to exist during the quaternary epoch, and a great number of other kinds of mammifers which were created during the tertiary epoch.

The various phases of the development of the animal and vegetable kingdoms on our globe, these perfected organized species each succeeding the other, and finally reaching the superior type which we call man, must, in our opinion, have been produced in the selfsame order, upon the other planets of our solar world. M. Flammarion proves, in the work which we have already quoted, that the physical and climatological constitution of the planets is similar to that of our globe. There is therefore no reason why things should have taken place otherwise in Mercury, Jupiter, or Venus, than in the Earth, in respect to the successive order of the creation and appearance of living beings, and, in our belief a precisely similar successive appearance of vegetables and animals, has taken place in these planets. The plants and animals of Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, &c., were certainly not identical with those species which have had existence on the Earth, and perhaps no resemblance could be traced between them, but all, in their successive appearance, obeyed the principle of progress and perfecting. Life, commencing in the burning waves of the primitive seas, subsequently manifested itself upon the continents. Animals of aërial organization have lived upon these continents, their species have by degrees reached the perfection of their type, at length, and finally, a creature appeared in these planets more complete, superior in organization, intelligence, and sensibility to all the animal creation which formed the population of each particular globe.

This superior being, this last step of the ascending scale of living creation proper to the planetary worlds, the corresponding analogous creature to terrestrial man, we shall take leave to call planetary man.