Page:Is Mars habitable - Wallace 1907.djvu/53

34 lands and tropical forests of much of the moisture produced by frequent and abundant rains. All these sources of supply are admittedly absent from Mars, which has no permanent bodies of water, no rain, and tropical regions which are almost entirely desert. Many writers have therefore doubted the existence of water in any form upon this planet, supposing that the snow-caps are not formed of frozen water but of carbon-dioxide, or some other heavy gas, in a frozen state; and Mr. Lowell evidently feels this to be a difficulty, since the only fact he is able to adduce in favour of the melting snows of the polar caps producing water is, that at the time they are melting a marginal blue band appears which accompanies them in their retreat, and this blue colour is said to prove conclusively that the liquid is not carbonic acid but water. This point he dwells upon repeatedly, stating, of these blue borders: "This excludes the possibility of their being formed by carbon-dioxide, and shows that of all the substances we know the material composing them must be water."

This is the only proof of the existence of water he adduces, and it is certainly a most extraordinary and futile one. For it is perfectly well known that although water, in large masses and by transmitted light, is of a blue colour, yet shallow water by reflected light is not so; and in the case of the liquid produced by the snow-caps of Mars,