Percival Lowell

“ Before this lamentable conclusion was reached, however, there would come a time in the course of the planets history when water was not yet wanting, but simply scarce and requiring to be husbanded; when, for the inhabitants, the one supreme problem of existence would be the water problem, — how to get water enough to sustain life, and how best to utilize every drop of water they could get. ”

“ Though seas no longer, we perceive, then, that there is some reason to believe the so-called seas of Mars to have been seas in their day, and to be at the moment midway in evolution from the seas of the earth to the seas of the moon.
Now, if a planet were at any stage of its career able to support life, it is probable that a diminishing water supply would be the beginning of the end of that life, for the air would outlast the available water. ”

“ From all this we may conclude that we have here a polar sea, a real body of water. There is, therefore, water on the surface of Mars. We also mark that this body of water is ephemeral. It exists while the snow-cap is melting, and then it somehow vanishes. What becomes of it, and whether there be other bodies of water on the planet, either permanent or temporary, we shall now go on to inquire.
While it existed in any size, the polar sea was bordered on the north, all the way round and during all the time it was visible, by blue-green areas. ”

“ But as a planet grows old, its oceans, in all probability, dry up, the water retreating through cracks and caverns into its interior. Water thus disappears from its surface, to say nothing of what is being continually imprisoned by chemical combination. Signs of having thus parted with its oceans we see in the case of the moon, whose so-called seas were probably seas in their day, but have now become old sea-bottoms. On Mars the same process is going on, but would seem not yet to have progressed so far, the seas there being midway in their career from real seas to arid depressed deserts ”

“ What the physical phenomena assert is this: if there be inhabitants, then irrigation must be the chief material concern of their lives.
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. ”

“ For, unlike the earth, which has water to spare, and to which, therefore, the unlocking of its polar snows is a matter of no direct economic value, Mars is apparently in straits for the article, and has to draw on its polar reservoir for its annual supply. Upon the melting of its polar cap, and the transference of the water thus annually set free to go its rounds, seem to depend all the seasonal phenomena on the surface of the planet. ”

“ There is thus reason to believe that the blue-green regions of Mars are not water, but, generally at least, areas of vegetation; from which it follows that Mars is very badly off for water, and that the planet is dependent on the melting of its polar snows for practically its whole supply.
Such scarcity of water on Mars is just what theory would lead us to expect. Mars is a smaller planet than the earth, and therefore is relatively more advanced in his evolutionary career. He is older in age, if not in years ”

“ If, therefore, Mars is to be many, his draughtsman must be one. So much, at least, is fulfilled by the drawings in which the changes now to be described are recorded; for they were all made by me, at the same instrument, under the same general atmospheric conditions. As the same personality enters all of them, it stands, as between them, eliminated from all, to increased certainty of deduction. Since, furthermore, the drawings were all made in the months preceding and following one opposition, change due to secular variation is reduced to a minimum. ”

“ Several important facts conspire to throw grave doubt, and worse, upon their aquatic character. To begin with, they are of every grade of tint, — a very curious feature for seas to exhibit, unless they were everywhere but a few feet deep; which again is a most singular characteristic for seas that cover hundreds of thousands of square miles in extent, — seas, that is, as big as the Bay of Bengal. The Martian surface would have to be amazingly flat for this to be possible. We know it to be relatively flat, but to be as flat as all this would seem to pass the bounds of credible simplicity. ”

“ With the familiar melting of the snow-cap begins the yearly round of the planet’s life. With the melting of our own arctic or antarctic cap might similarly be said to begin the earths annual activity. But here at the very outset there appears to be one important difference between the two planets. On the earth the relation of the melting of the polar snows to the awakening of surface activity is a case of post hoc simply; on Mars it seems to be a case of propter hoc as well. ”

“ Those of its inhabitants who had succeeded in surviving would find themselves at last face to face with the relentlessness of fate, — a scarcity of water constantly growing greater, till at last they would all die of thirst, either directly or indirectly; for either they themselves would not have water enough to drink, or the plants or animals which constituted their diet would perish for lack of it, an alternative of small choice to them, unless they were conventionally particular as to their mode of death. ”

“ These blue-green areas were strewn with several more or less bright regions, while below them came the great reddish-ochre stretches of the disc. Now, the blue-green areas have generally been considered to be seas, just as the reddish-ochre regions have been held to be land. That the latter are land there is very little doubt; not only land, but nothing but land, — land very pure and simple; that is, deserts. For they behave just as deserts should behave, chiefly by not behaving at all; remaining, except for certain phenomena to be specified later, unchangeable. ”

“ A wholesale transformation of the blue-green regions into orange-ochre ones was in progress upon that other world.
What can explain so general and so consecutive a change in hue? Water suggests itself; for a vast transference of water from the pole to the equator might account for it. But there are facts connected with the change which seem irreconcilable with the idea of water. In the first place, Professor W. H. Pickering found that the light from the great blue-green areas showed no trace of polarization. ”

“ The dip of the pole displayed the snow-cap to great advantage, and enabled the metamorphosis it underwent to be specially well seen.
Through June and July the snows were melting very fast, at the rate of hundreds of square miles a day. Such waning of them under the summer sun has been regularly observed to take place for the past two hundred years. At every Martian summer they shrink away to next to nothing, as systematically as the Martian summer comes on, an action on their part highly indicative of their character. ”

“ Corroborating this deduction is the fact that the northern sides of all the dark areas are very perceptibly darker than the southern ones; for the northern side is the one which a descending current would plough out, since it is the northern coasts that would be constantly opposing the currents northerly inertia. ”

“ Vacillating as these fluctuations in appearance may seem at first sight, they were really quite consistent; for they were due to one progressive change in the same direction, a change that was manifested first in Hesperia itself, and then in the regions round about it. From June to August, Hesperia changed from a previous blue-green, indistinguishable from its surroundings, to yellow, the parts adjacent remaining much as before. As a consequence, the peninsula stood out in marked contrast to the still deep blue-green regions by its side. ”

“ With sufficient telescopic power, the continuity of the dark belt is seen to be broken by a series of parallel peninsulas or semi-peninsulas that jut out from the lower edge of the belt, all running with one accord in a southeasterly direction, and dividing the belt into a similar series of parallel dark areas. ”