Percival Lowell

“ General considerations warrant us in believing that the Martian seas, lie our own, would contain salts in solution, while irrigation ditches, there as here, should flow fresh water to be erection of distilleries upon a gigantic scale. But if, on the contrary, the seas be not seas, but areas of vegetation, the difficulty vanishes at once; for if the planet be dependent upon the melting of its polar snows for its spring freshet, the water thus produced must necessarily be fresh, and the canals be directly provided with the water they want. ”

“ To look for the canals with a large instrument in poor air is like trying to read a page of fine print ket dancing before one’s eyes, and increase of magnification increases the motion. Advance in our study of other worlds spends upon choosing the very best atmospheric sites for our observatories.
As we shall now have to call these Martian things by their names, - our names, that is, - it may be well to consider cursorily the nomenclature with has been evolved on the subject. Unfortunately, the planet has been quite too much renamed, -benamed, indeed, out of all recognition. ”

“ It is not always when Mars is nearest to us that the canals are best seen. On the contrary, they show a sublime disregard for mere proximity. This is evidenced both by the changes in appearance of any one canal and by the changes in relative conspicuousness of different canals. Some instances of the metamorphosis will reveal this conclusively. For example, during the end of August and the beginning of September, at this last opposition, the canals about the Lake of the Sun were conspicuous, while the canals to the north of them were almost invisible. ”

“ In fact, it is by the very presence of uniformity and precision that we suspect things of artificiality. It was the mathematical shape of the Ohio mounds that suggested mound-builders; and so with the thousand objects of every-day life. Too great regularity is in itself the most suspicious of circumstances that some finite intelligence has been at work. If it be asked how, in the case of a body so far off as Mars, we can assert sufficient precision to imply artificiality, the answer is twofold: first, that the better we see these lines, the more regular they look ”

“ Before passing on to certain other phenomena connected with the canals of like significance, we may note here an obiter dictum of the irrigation theory of some slight corroborative worth; for if a theory be correct, it will not only fit all the facts, but at times go out of its way to answer questions. Such the present one seems to do. If the seas be seas, and the canals canals, we stand confronted by the problem how to make fresh-water canals flow out of salt-water seas. ”

“ As this point it is probable that a certain obstacle to such wholesale construction of canals, however, will arise in the mind of the reader, namely the thought of mountains; for mountains are by nature antagonistic to canals. Only the Czar of all the Russias -if we are to credit the account of the building of the Moscow railway - would be capable of running a canal regardless of topography. Nor will the doings at our own antipodes help us to conceive such construction; for though the Japanese irrigate hillsides, the water in the case comes from slopes higher yet, whereas on Mars it does not. ”

“ Were lines drawn haphazard over the surface of a globe, the chances are ever so many to one against more than two lines crossing each other at any point. Simple crossing of two lines would of course be common in something like factorial proportion to the number of lines, but that any other line should contrive to cross at the same point would be a coincidence whose improbability only a mathematician can properly appreciate, so very great is it. ”

“ After the fundamental fact that such curious phenomena as the canals are visible is the scarcely less important one that they are not always so. At times the canals are invisible, and this invisibility is real, not apparent; that is, it is not an invisibility due to distance or obscuration of any kind between us and them, but an actual invisibility due to the condition of the canal itself. With our present optical means, at certain seasons they cease to exist. ”

“ For a brand - new thing no name is so good as one whose meaning nobody knows, except one that has no meaning at all.
Schiaparelli’s scheme embraces all the other Martian features as well as the canals, and the same poetic imagination pervades the whole. For example, the central promontory of what used to be known as Dawes’ Forked Bay, a prominent point, since it has for some time been used as the zero meridian for Martian longitudes, he calls the Fastigium Aryn. ”

“ Physical processes never, so far as we know, produce perfectly regular results; that is, results in which irregularity is not also plainly discernible. Disagreement amid conformity is the inevitable outcome of the many factors simultaneously at work. From the orbits of the heavenly bodies to philotaxis and human features, this diversity in uniformity is apparent. As a rule, the divergences, though small, are quite perceptible; that is, the lack of absolute uniformity is comparable to the uniformity itself, and not of the negligible second order of unimportance. ”

“ Unchangeable, apparently, in position, the canals are otherwise among the most changeable features of the Martian disc. From being invisible, they emerge gradually, for some reason inherent in themselves, into conspicuousness. In short, phenomenally at least, they grow. The order of their coming carries with it a presumption of cause, for it synchronizes with the change in the Martian seasons.
1. A presentation of any part of the planet is the occasion when that part of the disc is turned toward the observer. ”

“ The result is that the whole of the great reddish-ochre portions of the planet is cut up into a series of spherical triangles of all possible sizes and shapes. What their number may be lies quite beyond the possibility our own air, the more of them are visible. About four times as many as are down on Schiaparelli’s chart of the same regions have been seen at Flagstaff. But before proceeding further with a description of these Martian phenomena, the history of their discovery deserves to be sketched, since it is as strange as the canals themselves. ”

“ A more striking instance of the irrelevancy of distance in the matter was observed in the same region by Schiaparelli in 1877. It is additionally interesting as practically dating his discovery of the canals. In early October of that year, on the evenings of the 2d and the 4th, he tells us, under excellent definition, and with the diameter of the planet’s disc 21 of arc, the continental region between the Pearl-Bearing Gulf and the Bay of the Dawn was quite uniformly, nakedly bright, and destitute of suspicion of markings of any sort. ”

“ It so chances that these conditions are fulfilled by the canal called the Titan. The Titan starts from the Gulf of the Titans, in south latitude 20°, and runs due north almost exactly upon the 169th meridian for an immense distance. I have followed it over 2300 miles down the disc about 43° north, as far as the tilt of the planet’s axis would permit. As the rotation of the planet swings it round, it passes the central meridian of the disc simultaneously throughout its length, and at that moment comes out strikingly straight, a substantialized meridian itself. ”

“ When the great continental areas, the reddish-ochre portions of the disc, are attentively examined in sufficiently steady air, their desert-like ground is seen to be traversed by a network of fine, straight dark lines. ”

“ Imperceptible in themselves. the heights become perceptible by their shadows. A road illuminated by a distant arc light gives us a starling instance of this; the smooth surface taking on from its shadows the look of a ploughed field.
It is this indirect kind of magnification that enables astronomers to measure the lunar mountains, and even renders such vicariously visible to the naked eye. Every one has noticed how ragged and irregular the inner edge seems perfectly smooth. In one place it will appear to project beyond the perfect elipse, in another to recede from it. ”

“ Conditions hold here which would necessitate a different state of things, inorganic and organic, apparently a much more artificial one. If cultivation there be, it must be cultivation upon a much more systematic scale, due in large part to a system of irrigation; just as any Martians must be quite different physically from men. ”

“ The same thing would appear in the case of the Martian terminator; a bright area would seem to project beyond a dark one. This accounts for a part of the loss. The other part is doubtless due to an actual depression in the Martian surface. Thus from the appearance of the terminator comes corroboration of the lower level at which we found reason (in the last paper) to suppose the dark markings upon the planet to lie.
That these long parings do not always coincide with the dark areas may help confirm, paradoxical as it sounds, their real depression ”

“ Indeed, for the lines to contain canals we must suppose either that mountains prove no obstacle to Martians, or else that there are practically no mountains on Mars. For the system seems sublimely superior to possible obstructions in the way ”

“ That the lines form a system; that, instead of running any whiter, they join certain points to certain others, making thus, not a simple network, but one whose meshes connect centres directly with one another, is striking at first sight, and loses none of things arising from purely natural causes becomes evident on consideration. ”

“ They cannot, for example, be rivers; for rivers could not be so obligingly of the same size at source and mouth, nor would they run from preference on ares of great circles. To do so, practically invariably, would imply a devotion to pure mathematics not common in rivers. ”

“ Doubt, however, will not wholly cease till more people have seen them, which will not happen till the importance of atmosphere in the study of planetary detail is more generally appreciated than it is today. ”