Page:The Solar System - Six Lectures - Lowell.djvu/88

70 In addition to the departure points on the borders of the dark regions which are provided by nature are a host of others not apparently so originated. These are the round black dots, the oases. They are found at the intersections of the lines. How important they are in the planet's economy is to be inferred from the host of canals each of them receives. Four, very rarely three, is the minimum number of approaches or departures from them, and this number rises in the case of Ceraunius to seventeen. Even London hardly has this number of railway lines entering and leaving it. It is not too much to suppose, though as yet we cannot count it more than a conjecture, that the oases serve some such purpose as our cities and are centres of population.

From this, we add to our list of conclusions, that the canals are artificial, and therefore imply organic intelligent life upon the planet.

Our synthesis leads, then, to the conclusion that Mars is circumstanced like ourselves in the midway of planetary existence, but that the planet has advanced further on the road to old age and death than we have yet done.

That its world-life was, in any but the broadest sense, an analogue of our own, is certainly not the case. Its career began under different physical