Page:Percival Lowell - an afterglow.djvu/58

Percival Lowell that life exists on Mars; and he has left, for us, a full record of his reasons for so thinking. It is not essential that one should agree with him, or have his point of view in order to enjoy his utterances. All that he himself would have asked of his readers was an acknowledgment, actual or virtual, of his honesty of purpose. He went so far as to say in his final lecture tour through the Northwest:—"That Mars is inhabited we have absolute proof."

His successors in this sublime investigation assuredly will be guided by the same love of scientific truth that animated him. He has left in store all the material resources with which to build an enduring monument. Filled by the warmth of his fire; thrilled by his achievements, with eye single towards the discovery of "the light that shifts, the glare that drifts"—which is truth itself—we rest content in the thought that those who follow in his field will keep clear, widen and extend the scientific trail in which he was the master-pioneer. 42