This, however, would only be the beginning of their troubles. Gradually the more advanced thinkers and the closest observers would perceive that not only had their world undergone processes of development, but that its entire mass had been formed by such processes--that in fact it had not been created at all, in the sense in which they had understood the word, but had _grown_. This would be very dreadful to these creatures, because they would not readily be able to dispossess their minds of the notion that they were the most important beings in the universe, their domain of space coextensive with the universe, the duration of their world coextensive with time. But passing over the difficulties thus arising, and the persecution and abuse to which those would be subjected who maintained the dangerous doctrine that their fruit home had been developed, not created, let us consider how these creatures would regard the question of other worlds than their own. At first they would naturally be unwilling to admit the possibility that other worlds as important as their own could exist. But if after a time they found reason to believe that their world was only one of several belonging to a certain tree system, the idea would occur to them, and would gradually come to be regarded as something more than probable, that those other fruit worlds, like their own, might be the abode of living creatures. And probably at first, while as yet the development of their own world was little understood, they would conceive the notion that all the fruits, large or small, upon their tree system were in the same condition as their own, and either inhabited by similar races or at least in the same full vigour of life-bearing existence. But so soon as they recognised the law of development of their own world, and the relation between such development and their own requirements, they would form a different opinion, if they found that only during certain stages of their world's existence life could exist upon it. If, for instance, they perceived that their fruit world must once have been so bitter and harsh in texture that no creatures in the least degree like themselves could have lived upon it, and that it was passing slowly but surely through processes by which it would become one day dry and shrivelled and unable to support living creatures, they would be apt, if their reasoning powers were fairly developed, to inquire whether other fruits which they saw around them on their tree system were either in the former or in the latter condition. If they found reason to believe certain fruits were in one or other of these stages, they would regard such fruits as not yet the abode of life or as past the life-supporting era. It seems probable even that another idea would suggest itself to some among their bolder thinkers. Recognising in their own world in several instances what to their ideas resembled absolute waste of material or of force, it might appear to them quite