"But at once, me excellent man o' wisdom, a number occur to me.

One of them is that this little party of three might have stopped here on their way to Ireland, an' for good reasons of their own decided to stay a while; an' another is that they might have come here afterward, havin' got wind of what those rats out there were contemplatin', and have stayed on the job till the time was ripe to save Ireland from 'em; the rest of the world, too, of course," he added magnanimously, "but Ireland in particular.

And do any of those reasons appeal to ye ?" I shook my head.
"Well, what do you think ?" he asked wearily.
"I think," I said cautiously, "that we face an evolution of highly intelligent beings from ancestral sources radically removed from those through which mankind ascended.

These half-human, highly developed batrachians they call the _Akka_ prove that evolution in these caverned spaces has certainly pursued one different path than on earth.

The Englishman, Wells, wrote an imaginative and very entertaining book concerning an invasion of earth by Martians, and he made his Martians enormously specialized cuttlefish.