Percival Lowell

“ In color the planet is ghastly white; of that wan hue that suggests a body from which all life has fled. Far whiter than Venus in point of fact, the rosy tint with which it sparkles in the sunset glow is all borrowed of the dying day and vanishes when the planet is looked at in the uncompromising light of noon. Seen close together once at Flagstaff it was possible directly to compare the two; when Mercury, although lit by the Sun two and a half times as brilliantly as Venus, was, surface for surface, more than twice as faint. ”

“ Only the edge next perpetual day has anything approaching an equal distribution of sunlight and shade. The farther one just peeps at the Sun for a moment every eighty-eight days, and then sinks back again into obscurity.
The transition from day to night is equally instantaneous and profound. For little or no twilight here prolongs the light; since the air, if there be any at all, is too thin to bend it to service round the edge to illuminate the night. When the libratory Sun sets, darkness like a mantle falls swiftly over the face of the ground. ”

“ There could be no better proof that Jupiter is no solid, but a seething mass of heavy vapors boiling like a caldron. Tempered by distance we can form but a faint idea of the turmoil there going on. Further indication of it is furnished by its glow. For all the dark belts are a beautiful cherry red, a tint extending even to the darkish hoods over the planet's caps. This hue comes out well in good seeing, and best, as with all planetary markings, in twilight, not at night, because the excessive brightness of the disk is then taken off, preventing the colors from being swamped. ”

“ It is not so much the slowness of the diurnal spin, eighty-eight times as long as our own, which is surprising, as the fact that this makes its day infinite in length. Two antipodal hemispheres divide the planet, the one of which frizzles under eternal sun, the other freezes amid everlasting night. The Sun does not, indeed, stand stock-still in the sky, but nods like some huge pendulum to and fro along a parallel of latitude. ”

“ Geology is necessarily limited in its scope to what has happened; planetology is not so circumscribed in its domain. It may indulge in prognostication of the future, and find countenance for its conclusions in the physiognomy of other worlds. Thus one of the things which it foresees is the relative drying up of our abode. To those whose studies have never led them off this earth, the fact that the oceans are slowly evaporating into space may seem as incredible as would, to one marooned on a desert island, the march of mankind in the meantime. ”

“ Seen itself, no longer imperfectly seen through, it wakes to semi-sentient existence, a spirit come to life aloft to shield us from the too immediate vacancy of space. The perfumes of the soil, the trees, the flowers, steal out to it, as the twilight glow itself exhales to heaven. In the hushed quiet of the gloaming Earth holds her breath, prescient of a revelation to come. ”

“ We feel chilly when a cloud passes over the Sun. On the other hand, slate reflects only 18 per cent of the visible rays, absorbing all the rest. This is why slate gets so much hotter in the Sun than chalk, and why men wear white in the tropics. White, indeed, is the best color to clothe one's self in the year around, except for the cold effect it has on the imagination, for it keeps one's own heat in as well as keeping the Sun's out. The modest, self-obliterating, white winter habit of the polar hares not only enables them to keep still and escape notice, but keeps them warm while they wait. ”

“ To think that this fair globe with all it has brought forth must lapse in time to nothingness; that the generations of men shall cease to be, their very records obliterated, is something to strike a chill into the heart of the most callous and numb endeavor at its core. That æons must roll away before that final day is to the mind of the far-seeing no consolation for the end. Not only that we shall pass, but that everything to show we ever were shall perish too, seems an extinction too overpowering for words.
But vain regret avails not to change the universe's course. ”

“ The unaccounted-for errors in the planetary theories are not such as point to the advent of any tramp. Another is, that judged by any scale of time we know, the chance of such occurrence is immeasurably remote. Not only may each of us rest content in the thought that he will die from causes of his own choosing or neglect, but the Earth herself will cease to be a possible abode of life, and even the Sun will have become cold and dark and dead so long before that day arrives that when the final shock shall come, it will be quite ready for another resurrection. ”

“ For at six in the morning the observer stands on the advancing side of the Earth, at the bow of the airship; at six at night he is at the stern. He, therefore, runs into the meteors at sunrise and slips away from them at sunset. He is pelted in the morning in consequence. Just as a pedestrian facing a storm gets wetter in front than behind. ”

“ Knowing the mechanical equivalent of heat, what we do is to calculate the quantity of motion involved and then evaluate it in heat. As we are unaware of the exact law of density of the Earth, and are ignorant of how much was radiated away in the process, the problem is a little like estimating the fortune of a man when we do not know the stocks in which he has invested, and ignore how much he has spent the while. ”

“ Indeed, we learn as much from the extensively advertised thermometers of winter resorts which, judiciously placed, beguile the stranger to sojourn where it is just too cold for comfort. The factor in question is the blanketing character of our air. Now a blanket may keep heat out as well as keep it in. Our air acts in both capacities. It is by no means simply a storer of heat, as many people seem to suppose; it is a heat-stopper as well. What it really is is a temporizer, a buffer to ease the shocks of sudden change like those comfortable, phlegmatic souls who reduce all emotion to a level. ”

“ In one hundred and forty-five days from the time it passed the distance of Jupiter it would reach the distance of the Earth. Coming from Vega, it would not hit the Earth or any of the outer planets, as the Sun's way is inclined to the planetary planes by some sixty degrees, but the effects would be none the less marked for that. Day and night alone of our astronomic relations would remain. It would be like going mad and yet remaining conscious of the fact. Instead of following the Sun we should now in whole or part, according to the direction of its approach, obey the stranger. ”

“ Our very day and night upon which turn the habits of all animals and, even in a measure, those of plants, are, as we have seen, not the possession of our nearest of cosmic kin. Our seasons which both vegetally and vitally mean so much are absent next door. And so the list of our globe's peculiar attributes might be run through to the finding of diversity to our familiar ways at every turn. But, as we shall see later, these differences from one planet to the next are not only not incompatible with a certain oneness of the whole, but actually help to make the family relationship discoverable. ”

“ Venus comes next in order outward from the Sun. To us her incomparable beauty is partly the result of propinquity: nearness to ourselves and nearness to the Sun. Relatively so close is she to both that she does not need the Sun's withdrawal to appear, but may nearly always be seen in the daytime in clear air if one knows where to look for her. Situate about seven-tenths of our own distance from our common giver of light and heat, she gets about double the amount that falls to our lot, so that her surface is proportionately brilliantly illuminated. ”

“ At the same time it is quite puerile to consider the universe as bounded by our terrestrial backyard. If man took himself a thought less importantly, he might perceive the humor of so circumscribed a view. Like children we play at being alone in the universe, and then go them one better by believing it too.
I shall, of course, not touch on any matters purely geologic, for fear of committing the very excesses I deplore; mentioning only such points as astronomy has information on, and which, by the sidelights it throws, may help to illuminate the subject. ”

“ Smaller than ourselves, his diameter is but a little over half the Earth's, or forty-two hundred miles, his mass one-ninth of ours, and his density about seven-tenths as much. Here, again, but in a different way, we find a planet unlike ourselves, and we know more about him than of any body outside the Earth and Moon. So much about him has been set forth elsewhere that it is enough to mention here that no oceans diversify his surface, no mountains relieve it, and but a thin air wraps it about,—an air containing water-vapor, but so clear that the surface itself is almost never veiled from view. ”

“ Our own Sun is an instance in embryo. If he live long enough, he will become such a solitary shrouded tramp in his old age. For he has no companion to betray him. The only way in which we could become cognizant of these wanderers would be by their chance collision with some other star, dark or lucent as the case might be. The impact of the catastrophe would generate so much light and heat that the previously dark body would be converted into a blazing sun and a new star make its advent in the sky. ”

“ A like indifference to solar action is exhibited in the utter obliviousness of the belts to day or night. To them darkness and light are nugatory alike. They reappear round the sunrise edge of the disk just as they left it when they sank from sight round the sunset one, and they march across its sunlit face without so much as a flicker on their features. ”

“ The latest generation has already succumbed to this ebbing of vitality with time. Every one of the satellites of the planets—those of Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, and our own Moon—is practically dead; born so the smaller which never were alive. Our own Moon carries its decrepitude on its face. ”

“ To pen the history of the solar system and leave out of it all mention of its most transcendentally wonderful result, the chemical evolution attendant upon cooling, would be to play "Hamlet" with Hamlet left out. For the thing which makes the second half of the great cosmic drama so inconceivably grand is the building up of the infinitely little into something far finer than the infinitely great. The mechanical action that first tore a sun apart, and then whirled the fragments into the beautifully symmetric system we behold to-day, is of a grandeur which is at least conceivable ”

“ It may be necessary for certain minds to be in the rear of the procession, but it is of doubtful glory to find distinction in the fact.
Thus the youth of a world, like the babyhood of an individual, is passed screened from immediate contact from without. That this is the only way that life can originate on a planet we cannot say, but that it is away in which it does occur, our own Earth attests, and that, moreover, it is the way with all planets of sufficient size, the present aspect of the major planets shows. ”

“ The best we can do to keep our heads steady is to lay firm hold at each step on the great underlying principles of physics. One of these is the conservation of the moment of momentum. This expression embodies one of the grandest generalizations of cosmic mechanics. The very phrase is fittingly sonorous, with something of that religious sublimity which the dear old lady said she found such a consolation in the biblical word Mesopotamia. Indeed the idea is grand for its very simplicity. Momentum means the quantity of motion in a body. It is the speed into the number of particles or the mass. ”

“ That summer is hotter than winter we all know from experience, pleasurable or painful as the case may be. This is due to the fact that the Sun is above the horizon for a greater number of hours in summer and passes more directly overhead. But not so many people are aware that on midsummer day, so far as the Sun is concerned, the north pole should be the hottest place on earth. That Arctic explorers, who have got within speaking acquaintance of it, assure us it is not so, shows that something besides the direct rays of the Sun is involved. ”

“ Half a century ago celestial mechanics dealt with bodies chiefly as points. The Earth was treated as a weighted point, and so was the Sun. This was possible because a sphere acts upon outside bodies as if all its mass were collected at its centre, and the Sun and many of the planets are practically spheres. But when it came to nicer questions of their present behavior and especially of their past career, it grew necessary to take their shape into account in their mutual effects. One of the results was the discovery of the great rôle played in evolution by tidal action. ”

“ Our veil of atmosphere cloaks them from our view. But wait, as an astronomer, till the Sun sinks behind the hills and his gorgeous gold of parting fades to amber amid the tender tapestry of trees. The very air takes on a meaning which the flood of day had swamped. ”

“ In consequence of the rigid uprightness of the planet's axis, seasons do not exist. Their nearest simulacrum comes from the seeming dilatation of the Sun during half the year, and its apparent contraction during the other half. It expands so much between its January and its July as to receive more heat in the ratio of nine to four. A seasonless, dayless, and almost yearless planet, it is better to look at than to look from; but its study opens our eyes to the great diversity which even one of our nearest neighbors exhibits from what we take as matters of course on Earth. ”

“ Every self-shining star is continually giving out light and heat. Now such an expenditure cannot go on forever, as the source of its replenishing by contraction, accretion, or disintegration is finite. Long to our measures of time as the process may last, it must eventually have an end and the star finally become a cold dark body, pursuing as before its course, but in itself inert and dead; an orb grown orbéd, in the old French sense. So it must remain unless some cosmic catastrophe rekindle it to life. ”

“ On the other hand, the chemical changes which follow a body's acquisition of heat, setting in the moment that heat has reached its acme and starts to decline, are as universal as the universe itself. They are conditioned, it is true, by the body's size and by the position that body occupied in the primal nebula, but they depend directly upon the degree of heat the body had attained. The larger the planet, the higher the temperature it reached and the fuller its possibilities. Even the planets are born to their estate. ”

“ That the Dead Sea, the Caspian, the Great Salt Lake, are slowly but surely giving way to land, is patent. If the climate at least were not more arid than before this could not occur; but more than this, if the ocean were not on the whole shrinking, there would be no tendency to leave such arms of itself behind to shrivel up. That the ocean basins are deepening is possible, but we know of one depletion which is not replaced—evaporation into space; and of another bound to come—withdrawal into fissures when the earth shall cease to be too hot. ”