Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 88.djvu/218

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��Popular Science Monthly

��In the canals Professor Lowell sees the life-lines of the planet. They are to him great irrigating trenches which con-

����The relative sizes of the moon and of direct Mars photographs are shown by these two circles. The size of the moon to the naked eye is indicated by the circle to the left; the circle to the right indicates the size of a direct Mars photograph before enlarge- ment. This disposes of the usual conten- tion that the Mars photographs made at Flagstaff are no larger than pinheads

duct the water of the melting snows to fertile fields thousands of miles away.

The Canals Are Irrigating Ditches

No more forcible argument in favor of this view can be advanced than their appearance and ar- rangement. Nature never works with mathematical preci- sion. Yet the canals have been planned with mathematical fore- sight. No whim governed the choice of their direction. Inva- riably they terminate in large well-defined spots, from which they radiate like spokes from the hub of a wheel. If there were one spot, or even two spots, to which a pair of lines converge, we might look on the phenome- non as one of the natural fea- tures of the planet. But when more than a dozen lines run with geometrical directness to a sin- gle spot, and, when, moreover, the spots themselves are connect- ed by lines and are in no sense isolated, we must assume that an intelligence has been at work.

Aptly enough the spots and lines are distributed in the very regions where we should expect a Martian engineer to place them; in other words just where

��water is needed. Were it not for their staggering length (fifteen hundred to four thousand miles), we should never see the canals at all. Viewed from a dis- tance of more than thirty-five million miles even so large a city as Chicago or London would be no larger than the head of a pin. W^hat we see is not really a waterway, but, as Dr. Pickering and Dr. Lowell has pointed out, the vegetation that fringes its banks.

Curiously enough, the canals disappear at intervals, only to reappear with their old clearness. On the face of it this would seem in itself an unanswerable refutation to any theory which assumes that the canals are irrigating ditches. It would be absurd for a hypothetical race of Martians to dig canals periodically, only to fill them again. But Dr. Lowell explains the disappearance very simply. What we see is but the sea- sonal growth of the vegeta- l^rl^^^.

. . -Ill T"- «-" iidKcu eye

tion along the banks, i mie is required for the water of the polar seas to make

����The relative visible sizes of the moon and Mars. In the small circle is a photograph of the moon (the size which it appears to the naked eye). In the large circle, is a drawing of Mars exactly the size which it appears through the telescope with a power of 392 diameters — the lowest used

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