Page:Is Mars habitable - Wallace 1907.djvu/22

1.] our own, and a succession of seasons of the same character as ours but of nearly double the length owing to its much longer year, seemed to leave little wanting to render this planet a true earth on a smaller scale. It was therefore very natural to suppose that it must be inhabited, and that we should some day obtain evidence of the fact.

Hence the great interest excited when Schiaparelli, at the Milan Observatory, during the very favourable opposition of 1877 and 1879, observed that the whole of the tropical and temperate regions from 60° N. to 60° S. Lat. were covered with a remarkable network of broader curved and narrower straight lines of a dark colour. At each successive favourable opposition, these strange objects called canali (channels) by their discoverer, but rather misleadingly 'canals' in England and America, were observed by means of all the great telescopes in the world, and their reality and general features became well established. In Schiaparelli's first map they were represented as being much broader and less sharply defined than he himself and other observers found by later and equally favourable observations that they really were.

In 1881 another strange feature was discovered