Page:Mars - Lowell.djvu/180

126 changing with regard to the surface into a more and more westerly one. If the surface were not frictionless, friction would somewhat reduce the westerly component, but could never wholly destroy it without stopping the particle.

We see, therefore, that any body, whether solid, liquid, or gaseous, must, in traveling away from the pole of a sphere or spheroid, necessarily deviate to the west as it goes on, if the spheroid itself revolve, as Mars does, in the opposite direction.

Now this inevitable trend induced in anything flowing from the pole to the equator is precisely the one that we notice stereotyped so conspicuously in the Martian south temperate markings. Here, then, we have at once a suspiciously suggestive hint that they once held water, and that that water flowed.

Corroborating this deduction is the fact that the northern sides of all the dark areas are very perceptibly darker than the southern ones; for the northern side is the one which a descending current would plough out, since it is the northern coasts that would be constantly opposing the current's northerly inertia. Consequently, although at present the descending stream be quite inadequate to such task, it still finds its way, from preference, to these lowest levels, and makes them greener than the rest.

Though seas no longer, we perceive, then,