Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 88.djvu/217

 Popular Science Monthly

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��fessor Percival Lowell established at Flagstaff, Arizona, an observatory, equipped with the best instruments ob- tainable for the special study of Mars. He has gathered about him a corps of observers, who have become wonderfully skilled in refined Alartian observation ; he has the advantage of viewing the planet in an atmosphere unsurpassed for clearness ; he has made his observatory the fountain-head of all important Mar- tian discoveries. To him we owe our re- markably detailed knowledge of the planet's sur- face m a r k - ings.

The Seven

Hundred

Canals —

What Arc

They?

It was Pro- fessor Lowell who not only con firmed Schiaperelli's discoveries of the canals, but who plot- ted them ac- curately year after year and added to them until now their n u m b e r is seven hun- d r e d and eighty - eight. It is he who or i g i nated and for more than twenty years has de- veloped the theory that the canals are all that their name implies — artificial waterways con- structed by intelligent beings. Per- haps it is because he has so persistently heaped one piece of evidence upon an- other to prove his theories that there is any Mars controversy at all. His op- ponents would probably be more in- clined to accept the existence of the canals if he had not interpreted the

���The distinguishing surface features of Mars are the snow caps at the poles, vast russet areas and blue-green regions between the poles, and the fine, straight lines which are known as "canals." Dr. Lowell holds that the straight lines are indeed "canals," and serve to conduct the water from the melting snows at the poles to the russet-brown areas, which are deserts, and cause them to flourish. Dr. Lowell's theory finds confirma- tion in the fact that portions of the russet-brown areas assume the characteristic blue-green hue of vegetation with the advent of Spring

��markings of Mars in the way that seemed most natural and simple to him. It is certain that they accept without question the markings of other planets, plotted under the same conditions.

The significance of the canals is ap- parent when it is considered that no- where on Mars is there any water ex- cept at the poles. Ages older than the earth, Mars has arrived at a pitiful con- dition which may best be described as deadly aridity. Long ago much of the fertile area of the planet shriveled to

a n immense desert. Oceans, seas, and lakes leaked into the interior by way of caverns and c.r e V i c e s , leaving, only parched ba- sins. The at- m o s p h e r - ic gases have in part float- ed away, so that the air has become as rare and as thin as we should expect to find it miles above the Rocky ^Mountains. Whatever wa- ter still r e - mains, gath- e r s in the form of snow or hoar frost at the poles. Clearly, if

��Mars is inhabited, Professor Lowell ar- gues, the one supreme task that engages the attention of every thinking being on the planet is the utilization of that pa- thetically scant supply of water. If it were possible to conduct the water of the melting snows in spring to those portions of the torrid and temperate zones that would still bring forth, if properly nour- ished, a race might save itself.

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