Page:The evolution of worlds - Lowell.djvu/116

88 investigator, but merely illustrative of superior equipment. They showed conclusively that a rotation of anything like twenty-four hours was out of the question. They yielded, indeed, testimony to a negative rotation of three months, which, interpreted, means that so slow a spin as this was beyond their power to precise.

For Dr. Slipher was at no less care to determine just what precision was possible in the case, although a speed corresponding to a spin of twenty-four hours on a globe the size of Venus is well known to be spectroscopically measurable. It would mean a motion toward us of one thousand miles an hour, or about a third of a mile a second. The tilt occasioned by this speed is well within the spectroscope's ability to disclose. Not content with this, however, by two special investigations, he proved the spectroscope's actual limits of performance to be far within the quantity concerned. One of them was the determination by the same means and in like manner of the rotation time of Mars, the length of that planet's day, which in other ways we know to the hundredth of a second, and which is 24$h$ 37$m$ 23$s$.66. Now Mars offers a test nearly twice as difficult as Venus, even supposing the apparent disks of the two the same, because his diameter being less in the proportion roughly of one-half, the actual speed of a particle at his edge is less for the same time of rotation in the like proportion, and it is only