Scottish physician and author, best known for his Sherlock Holmes stories, who occasionally wrote fiction about unusual forms of life. In "When the World Screamed" (1929) he envisions the Earth as a gigantic living organism (see planets, as living beings). The notion of refugia on a dramatic scale is the subject of his novel The Lost World (1912), while "The Horror of the Heights" takes as its (now obsolete) theme the idea of strange organisms inhabiting the upper atmosphere.
