"This book presents key documents from the pre-1915 history of the extraterrestrial life debate. Introductions and commentaries accompany each source document, some of which are published here for the first time or in a new translation. Authors included are Aristotle, Lucretius, Aquinas, Galileo, Kepler, Pascal, Fontenelle, Huygens, Newton, Pope, Voltaire, Kant, Herschel, Paine, Chalmers, Whewell, Darwin, Wallace, Dostoevsky, Lowell, and Antoniadi, among others."--Jacket.