A. Lawrence Lowell

“ And the same trait that was apparent sociologically has been exposed in this our antipodal phase of psychical research. We have seen how impersonal is his language, the principal medium of communication between one soul and another; how impersonal are the communings of his soul with itself. How the man turns to nature instead of to his fellowman in silent sympathy. And how, when he speculates upon his coming castles in the air, his most roseate desire is to be but an indistinguishable particle of the sunset clouds and vanish invisible as they into the starry stillness of all-embracing space. ”

“ It is not likely that the stranger would be noticed simply from its appearance until it had attained the eleventh magnitude. It would then be one hundred and forty-nine astronomical units from the Sun or at five times the distance of Neptune. But its detection would come about not through the eye of the body, but through the eye of the mind. Long before it could have attracted man’s attention to itself directly its effects would have betrayed it. Previous, indeed, to its possible showing in any telescope the behavior of the outer planets of the system would have revealed its presence. ”

“ He then takes up the question of atmosphere, which, with water, is absolutely necessary for life, and even for physical changes of any kind “when once what was friable had crumbled to pieces under the alternate roasting and refrigerating, relatively speaking, to which the body’s surface would be exposed as it turned round on its axis into and out of the sun’s rays. Such disintegration once accomplished, the planet would roll thenceforth a mummy world through space,” like our own moon, as he says, where, except for the possible tumbling in of a crater wall, all is now deathly still. ”

“ From his own active and ambitious nature, Percival little required such a stimulus; and, indeed, he struck out an intellectual path of his own in boyhood. He took to astronomy, read many books thereon, had a telescope of his own, of about two and a quarter inches in diameter, with which he observed the stars from the flat roof of our house; and later in life he recalled that with it he had seen the white snow cap on the pole of Mars crowning a globe spread with blue-green patches on an orange ground. ”

“ Botany therefore occupied his thoughts during his last days on earth.
“The death of Percival Lowell is a severe loss to the Arboretum. He understood its purpose and sympathized with its efforts to increase knowledge. Few collectors of plants have shown greater enthusiasm or more imagination, and living as he did in what he has himself described as “one of the most interesting regions of the globe” there is every reason to believe that as a botanist Percival Lowell would have become famous.” ”

“ His own is that while the oceans were still hot a vast steaming must have gone up from them, forming clouds of great density that would keep the sun’s heat and light out, and the warmth of the Earth in. “In paleozoic times, then, it was the Earth itself, not the Sun, to which plant and animal primarily stood beholden for existence. This gives us a most instructive glimpse into one planetologic process. To the planet’s own internal heat is due the chief fostering of the beginnings of life upon its surface.” ”

“ Unexplained perturbations in the motions of the planets, the far tremors of its coming, would have spoken to astronomers as the first heralding of the stranger and of the destruction it was about to bring. Neptune and Uranus would begin to deviate from their prescribed paths in a manner not to be accounted for except by the action of some new force. Their perturbations would resemble those caused by an unknown exterior planet, but with this difference that the period of the disturbance would be exactly that of the disturbed planet’s own period of revolution round the Sun. ”

“ At Flagstaff in 1896 his observations were verified and the inference later confirmed by the spectroscope, which was, indeed, first brought to the Observatory for that purpose. Thus Venus, which from its distance from the Sun, its size and density, is most like the Earth, turns out to be in a totally different condition, one face baked by unending glare, the other chilled in interstellar night, and as he puts it: “To Venus the Sun stands substantially stock-still in the sky,— ... No day, no seasons, practically no year, diversifies existence or records the flight of time. ”

“ The far plummet of man’s analysis would have sounded the cause of their disturbance and pointed out the point from which that disturbance came. Celestial mechanics would have foretold, as once the discovery of another planet, so now the end of the world. ”

“ He describes four ways in which a planet, and all life thereon, may be destroyed. Three of these are: the effect of tidal action that would bring the same face always toward the Sun; the loss of water and atmosphere; and the cooling and final extinction of the Sun. All these things he cheerfully reminds us are sure to happen, but at a time enormously distant. The other is a collision with a star—“That any of the lucent stars, the stars commonly so called, could collide with the Sun, or come near enough to amount to the same thing, is demonstrably impossible for aeons of years. ”

“ The non-expert reader must remember that the mass and the size—still more the apparent size—are very different things, and the mass is the only one that could be found by calculation, for this alone affects the attraction, which at such a distance is quite independent of the density and hence of the size. Moreover, the apparent size depends also upon the extent to which the surface reflects the light of the sun—technically termed the planet’s albedo—a matter that has no relation to the perturbation of another body. ”

“ When a fairly acute eyed observer sets himself to scan the telescopic disk of the planet in steady air, he will, after noting 113 the dazzling contour of the white polar cap and the sharp outlines of the blue-green areas, of a sudden be made aware of a vision as of a thread stretched somewhere from the blue-green across the orange areas of the disk. Gone as quickly as it came, he will instinctively doubt his own eyesight, and credit to illusion what can so unaccountably disappear. ”

“ Now it is the large size and attraction of Jupiter by which Percival explains the presence of asteroids with gaps in their ranks, instead of a planet, in the space between it and Mars; but we shall hear much more of this subject when we come to his work on Saturn’s rings and the order in the distribution of the planets.
Jupiter, he tells us, having a mass 318 times that of the Earth, and a volume 1400 times as large, is much less dense, not much more than water, in short still fluid; and as it has a tremendous spin, rotating in less than ten hours, it is more oblate than the Earth ”

“ Some of the planets may once have been white-hot, and luminous of themselves, some were certainly red-hot, some only darkly warm; all growing cooler after the amount radiated exceeded the amount generated. Now by the difference in the heat generated and retained by the larger and smaller bodies he explains the diverse appearance of those whose surfaces we know, the Earth, Mars and the Moon. As the surface cools it forms a crust, but if the interior still remains molten it will continue to contract, the crust will be too large for it and crinkle, like the skin of a dried apple ”

“ Whether among recognized uncertainties it is more rational to suppose a very high density, and very low albedo, with corresponding perturbations of Uranus and Neptune, whose orbits are still imperfectly known, or to conclude that a planet, which would account for these things if dense enough, revolves in fact in the appropriate path, a mere ghost of itself—a phantom but not a force—one who is not an astronomer must leave to the professionals. ”

“ If, therefore, the planet possess inhabitants, there is but one course open to them in order to support life. Irrigation, and upon as vast a scale as possible, must be the all-engrossing Martian pursuit....
“At this point in our inquiry, when direct deduction from the general physical phenomena observable on the planet’s surface shows that, were there inhabitants there, a system of irrigation would be an all-essential of their existence, the telescope presents us with perhaps the most startling discovery of modern times,—the so-called canals of Mars.” ”

“ In 1912 Lowell and Slipher (V. M.) successfully attacked the difficult problem of the rotation of Uranus. One side of a rotating planet is approaching us, the other receding. If its image is thrown on a spectroscope, so that its equatorial regions fall upon the slit, the lines of the spectrum will be shifted toward the violet on one edge, and the red on the other, and will cross it at a slant instead of at right angles. This method had long before been applied to Jupiter and to Saturn and its rings, but Uranus is so faint as to discourage previous observation. ”

“ Then its appearance is unexpectedly bright, while its spectrum shows bands which as yet, for the most part, defy explanation, though they state positively the vast amount of its atmosphere and its very peculiar constitution. But first and not least of its surprises was its discovery,—a set of surprises, in fact. For after owing recognition to one of the most brilliant mathematical triumphs, it turned out not to be the planet expected.
“‘Neptune is much nearer the Sun than it ought to be,’ is the authoritative way in which a popular historian puts the intruding planet in its place. ”

“ He points out also that the water cannot flow through the canals by nature, because on the surface of a planet in equilibrium gravity would not draw it in any direction toward or away from the equator. “No natural force propels it, and the inference is forthright and inevitable that it is artificially helped to its end. There seems to be no escape from this deduction.” In short, since water certainly cannot flow by gravity both ways in the same canal, the inhabitants of Mars have not only dug the canals, but pump the water through them. ”

“ The meteorites that are seen because they become hot and luminous in traversing our atmosphere, and occasionally fall upon the Earth, are the remnants of vastly larger numbers formerly circling about the sun, but which, by collision and attraction, were, as he describes, gathered into great masses, thus forming the planets. The force of gravity gradually compacted these fragments closer and closer together, thereby generating heat which if the body were homogeneous would be in proportion to the square of its mass. ”

“ When once the elements of Pluto’s orbit are known, the calculation of the perturbations which it produces on another planet, such as Neptune, are greatly simplified. But the problem of finding Pluto’s mass from observations of Neptune is still none too easy, for the perturbations affect the calculated values of the elements of Neptune’s orbit, and are thus “entangled” with them in an intricate fashion. ”

“ It occurred to Percival that this might be due to an error in the calculation of the motion of the rings, that if the attraction of Saturn were slightly more than had been supposed the revolutions of all parts of the rings would be slightly faster, and the places in them where the periods would be commensurate with the satellites would be slightly farther out, that is where the divisions actually occur. Everyone knows that the earth is not a perfect sphere but slightly elliptical, or oblate, contracted from pole to pole and enlarged at the equator ”

“ How he lives his life long the slave of patriarchal customs of so puerile a tendency as to be practically impossible to a people really grown up. How he practises a wholesale system of adoption sufficient of itself to destroy any surviving regard for the ego his other relations might have left. How in his daily life he gives the minimum of thought to the bettering himself in any worldly sense, and the maximum of polite consideration to his neighbor. ”

“ We all have felt this impulse in our childhood as our ancestors did before us, when they conjured goblins and spirits from the vasty void, and if our energy continue we never cease to feel its force through life. ”