‘But who shall dwell in these worlds if they be inhabited?
. . . Are we or they Lords of the World? . . . And
how are all things made for man?’
KEPLER (quoted in The Anatomy of Melancholy)
No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century thatthis world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater thanman’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves abouttheir various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost asnarrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatur