Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 70.djvu/477

Rh rays. At last when they did not show agreement among themselves I concluded they must be illusions. This was verified by specific trial, proving that such lines appear on perfectly blank areas. The rays so observed are sometimes double.

Against the obstacles of bad atmosphere, minuteness of detail and faintness, the observer has to wage a hard fight, and it is a matter of congratulation that he sees such faint canal-like marks on the very limit of vision. With full records the public may then discuss the interpretation.

The ray illusion is to me a very satisfactory explanation of many faint canals radiating from those small spots on Mars, called 'lakes' or 'oases.' The only objective reality in such cases is the spot from which they start. The reader will notice that rays on opposite sides of a star are usually in line. So when two lakes or oases lie along such a line they will appear connected by a canal. Nor do the oases need to be very close together. A ray 16′ long to the naked eye appears 4″ long on a planet magnified 240 diameters. With the planet Mars 16″ in diameter the ray then extends one fourth across it. It appears like a canal over one thousand miles long.

I believe the industrious observer has found and will find it difficult to avoid instinctively placing his head in a position favorable to producing combinations of this kind. After he has laboriously memorized the leading details, so that he may recognize what he sees, when, for an instant, Heaven vouchsafes him a brief view, he naturally has a powerful inclination always to observe in the same posture, for he finds that with a slight movement of his head his structure of fainter canals is liable to disorganization. This insistence upon the same attitude is at once understood when we consider a larger part of the faint canals to be due to rays in the eye.

We have here the medicine to prevent this disease in the future. Let the observer constantly vary the position of the head. As soon as the seeing becomes sufficiently good to reveal fine detail, let the movement of the head begin. A rotation through an arc of twenty or thirty degrees ought to be large enough to test thoroughly any fancied combination of canals. Drawings carefully made in this way will have one source of error eliminated.

The halo with its light area and secondary image accounts for details which have no objective reality, such as bright limbs of definite width, canals paralleling the limb or dark areas, numerous light margins along dark areas and light areas in the midst of dark—abundantly exemplified in Schiaparelli's map of 1881–2.

When a ribbon-like mark has sufficient width, it must appear