Percival Lowell

“ When it is attained, the molecule of oxygen travels at the rate of one and eight tenths miles a second, the molecule of water vapor at the rate of two and one half miles a second, and the molecule of hydrogen at over seven miles a second, or four hundred and fifty times as fast as our fastest express train.
Now, if a body, whether it be a molecule or a cannon-ball, be projected away from the Earth’s surface, the Earth will at once try to pull it down again: this instinctive holding on of Mother Earth to what she has we call gravity. ”

“ The coast line of the dark areas appears as clear-cut when the canals are invisible as when they become conspicuous.
A canal, then, alters in visibility for some reason connected with itself. It grows into recognition from intrinsic cause. But, during all its metamorphoses, in one thing, and in one thing only, it remains fixed,—in position. Temporary in appearance, the canals are apparently permanent in place. Not only do they not change in position during one opposition; they seem not to do so from one opposition to another. ”

“ The essential oneness of the universe is the goal to which all learning tends. Just as Newton proved all the planets to obey a common force, the Sun; just as Laplace showed it to be probable that we were all evolved from one and the same primal nebula; so more recently the spectroscope has revealed unsuspected relationship betwixt us and the stars. Matter turns out to be but common property; and the very same substances with which we are so familiar on the Earth, iron, magnesium, sodium, and so forth, prove present on those far-off suns that strew the depths of space. ”

“ For all practical purposes Mars is our nearest neighbor in space. Of all the orbs about us, therefore, he holds out most promise of response to that question which man instinctively makes as he gazes up at the stars: What goes on upon all those distant globes? Are they worlds, or are they mere masses of matter? Are physical forces alone at work there, or has evolution begotten something more complex, something not unakin to what we know on Earth as life? ”

“ When we put all these phenomena together,—the presence of the spots at the junctions of the canals, their strangely systematic shapes, their seasonal darkening, and, last but not least, the resemblance of the great continental regions of Mars to the deserts of the earth,—a solution of their character suggests itself at once; to wit, that they are oases in the midst of that desert, and oases not wholly innocent of design, for, in number, position, shape, and behavior, the oases turn out as typical and peculiar a feature of Mars as the canals themselves. ”

“ What is more, we see him at such times better than we ever do Venus, for the latter, contrary to what her name might lead one to expect, keeps her self so constantly cloaked in cloud that we are permitted only the most meagre peeps at her actual surface; while Mars, on the other hand, lets us see him as he is, no cloud-veil of his, as a rule, hiding him from view. He thus offers us opportunities for study at closer range than does any other body in the universe except the Moon. ”

“ The critical velocity is the parabolic velocity, inasmuch as gravity is able to destroy on the way up just the speed it is able to impart on the way down. But, now, if the body’s departure were even hastier than this, the Earth would never be able wholly to annihilate its speed, and the body would travel out and out forever. If its speed at starting were less than twenty-seven miles a second, it would become thenceforth a satellite of the Sun; if its speed were yet greater, it would become an independent rover through space, paying brief visits only to star after star. ”

“ As we all know, a large man is more unwieldy than a small one. An elephant refuses to hop like a flea; not because he considers the act undignified, but simply because he cannot bring it about. If we could, we should all jump straight across the street, instead of painfully paddling through the mud. Our inability to do so depends upon the size of the Earth, not upon what it at first seems to depend, on the size of the street. ”

“ The law of gravitation, for example, than which we believe nothing to be more true, depends eventually, as recognized by us, upon a question of probability; and so do the thousand and one problems of daily life upon so many of which we act unhesitatingly and should be philosophic fools if we did not. All deduction rests ultimately upon the data derived from experience. This is the tortoise that supports our conception of the cosmos. For us, therefore, the point at issue in any theory is not whether there be a possibility of its being false, but whether there be a probability of its being true. ”

“ We may thus make a far journey without leaving home, and from the depths of our arm-chairs travel in spirit to lands we have no hope of ever reaching in body. We may add to this the natural delight of the explorer, for we shall be gazing upon details of Martian geography never till last summer seen by man.
Areography is a true geography, as real as our own. Quite unlike the markings upon Jupiter or Saturn, where all we see is cloud, in the markings on Mars we gaze upon the actual surface features of the Martian globe. ”

“ Having thus followed to its vanishing point the polar cap, we will now return to it in the heyday of its youth, in June, 1894, when it was girdled by its broad blue belt. We have seen that we have reason to believe this to be in all probability 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 ice-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 will now go on to inquire. ”

“ It is in this that lies the peculiar interest of Mars.
That just as there are other masses of matter than our globe, so there are among them other worlds than ours is an instant and inevitable inference from what we see about us. That we are the only part of the cosmos possessing what we are pleased to call mind is so earth-centred a supposition, that it recalls the other earth-centred view once so devoutly held, that our little globe was the point about which the whole company of heaven was good enough to turn. ”

“ If, therefore, a molecule of free hydrogen were present at the surface of the Earth, and met with no other gas attractive enough to tie it down by uniting with it, the rover would, in course of time, attain a speed sufficient to allow it to bid good-by to Earth, and start on interspacial travels of it own. That it should reach its maximum speed is all that is essential to liberty, the direction of its motion being immaterial. To molecule after molecule would come this happy dispatch, till the Earth stood deprived of every atom of free hydrogen. ”

“ To look for the canals with a large instrument in poor air is like trying to read a page of fine print kept dancing before one's eyes, with the additional disadvantage that increase of magnification increases the motion. ”

“ General considerations warrant us in believing that the Martian seas, like our own, would contain salts in solution, while irrigation ditches, there as here, should flow fresh water to be most effective, and we seem committed to the 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. ”

“ Now, inasmuch as time and space are not, as some philosophers have from their too mundane standpoint supposed, forms of our intellect, but essential attributes of the universe, the time taken by any process affects the character of the process itself, as does also the size of the body undergoing it. The changes brought about in a large planet by its cooling are not, therefore, the same as those brought about in a small one. ”

“ Whatever the particular planet's line of development, however, in its own line, it proceeds to greater and greater degrees of evolution, till the process stops, dependent, probably, upon the Sun. The point of development attained is, as regards its capabilities, measured by the planet's own age, since the one follows upon the other.
Now, in the special case of Mars, we have before us the spectacle of a world relatively well on in years, a world much older than the Earth. To so much about his age Mars bears evidence on his face. He shows unmistakable signs of being old. ”

“ Even too close agreement with one's self is suspicious. In the matter of fine detail, absolute agreement is therefore neither to be expected nor to be desired.
All the changes so far observed on the planet's disk are, I believe, capable of explanation either by errors of observation or by seasonal change. For, as is the case with the Earth, not only must vegetation produce different appearances according to the time of year, but its aspects would vary somewhat as between year and year. ”

“ To all forms of life of which we have any conception, two things in nature are vital, air and water. A planet must possess these two requisites to be able to support any life at all upon its surface. For there is no creature, no plant, no anything endowed with the possibility of that kind of change we call life, which is not in some measure dependent upon both of them. How, then, is Mars off for air? ”

“ Now, it is a highly significant fact that there is no free hydrogen found in the Earth’s atmosphere. There is plenty of it in the captivity of chemical combination, but none in the free state. This coincidence of lack of hydrogen with lack of liberty takes on yet more significance from the further fact that the same is not true of oxygen, water vapor, or indeed of any of the other gases we know. With them, freedom is not synonymous with absence. ”

“ That Mars seems to be inhabited is not the last, but the first word on the subject. More important than the mere fact of the existence of living beings there, is the question of what they may be like. Whether we ourselves shall live to learn this cannot, of course, be foretold. One thing, however, we can do, and that speedily: look at things from a standpoint raised above our local point of view; free our minds at least from the shackles that of necessity tether our bodies; recognize the possibility of others in the same light that we do the certainty of ourselves. ”

“ There is a certain peculiarity about the surface markings of Mars, which is pretty sure to strike any thoughtful observer who examines the planet's disk, with a two- or a three-inch object-glass,—their singular sameness night after night. With quite disheartening regularity, each evening presents him with the same appearance he noted the evening before,—a dark band obliquely belting the disk, strangely keeping its place in spite of the nightly procession of the meridians ten degrees to the east, in consequence of our faster rotation gaining on the slower rotation of Mars. ”

“ We may therefore feel tolerably certain that Mars is a flat world; devoid, as we may note incidentally, of summer resorts, since it possesses, apparently, neither seas nor hills. To canals we will now return. The canals so far described all lie in the bright reddish-ochre portions of the disk,—those parts which bear every appearance of being desert. But Mr. Douglass has made the discovery that they are not the only part of the planet thus privileged. ”

“ Now, at this point in our investigation, when the broad features of Mars disclose conditions which imply irrigation as their organic corollary, we are suddenly confronted on the planet's face with phenomena so startlingly suggestive of this very thing as to seem its uncanny presentment. Indeed, so amazingly lifelike is their appearance that, had we possessed our present knowledge of the planet's physical condition before, we might almost have predicted what we see as criterion of the presence of living beings. ”

“ A cloud is an event on Mars, a rare and unusual phenomenon, which should make it more fittingly appreciated there than Ruskin lamented was the case on Earth, for it is almost perpetually fine weather on our neighbor in space. From the day’s beginning to its close, and from one end of the year to the other, nothing appears to veil the greater part of the planet’s surface. ”