Mars and Its Canals

PART I. Natural Features

NATURAL FEATURES

CHAPTER

I. ON EXPLORATION 3

II. A DEPARTURE-POINT 12

III. A BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF PAST MARTIAN DISCOVERY 20

IV. THE POLAR CAPS 32

V. BEHAVIOR OF THE POLAR CAPS 41

VI. MARTIAN POLAR EXPEDITIONS 54

VII. WHITE SPOTS 73

VIII. CLIMATE AND WEATHER 82

IX. MOUNTAINS AND CLOUD 96

X. THE BLUE-GREEN AREAS 108

XI. VEGETATION 119

XII. TERRAQUEOUSNESS AND TERRESTRIALITY 128

XIII. THE REDDISH-OCHRE TRACTS 148

XIV. SUMMARY 159

PART II. Non-Natural Features

NON-NATURAL FEATURES

XV. THE CANALS 173

XVI. THEIR SYSTEM 184

XVII. GEMINATION OF THE CANALS 192

I. THE DIPLOPIC THEORY 196

II. THE INTERFERENCE THEORY 201

III. THE ILLUSION THEORY 202

XVIII. THE DOUBLE CANALS 204

XIX. CANALS IN THE DARK REGIONS 243

XX. OASES 249

XXI. CARETS ON THE BORDERS OF THE GREAT DIAPHRAGM 265

XXII. THE CANALS PHOTOGRAPHED 271

PART III. The Canals in Action

THE CANALS IN ACTION

XXIII. CANALS: KINEMATIC 281

XXIV. CANAL DEVELOPMENT INDIVIDUALLY INSTANCED 304

XXV. HIBERNATION OF THE CANALS 313

XXVI. ARCTIC CANALS AND POLAR RIFTS 325

XXVII. OASES: KINEMATIC 330

PART IV. Explanation

EXPLANATION

XXVIII. CONSTITUTION OF THE CANALS AND OASES 337

XXIX. LIFE 348

XXX. EVIDENCE 360

XXXI. THE HUSBANDING OF WATER 366

XXXII. CONCLUSION 376

INDEX 385

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PLATES

MARS’ HILL Frontispiece

PAGE

THE HERMITAGE 8

THE SAN FRANCISCO PEAKS 18

MARTIAN MAPS BY:

I. BEER AND MAEDLER. 1840 26

II. KAISER. 1864 26

III. FLAMMARION (RÉSUMÉ). 1876 27

IV. GREEN. 1877 27

V. SCHIAPARELLI. 1877 28

VI. SCHIAPARELLI. 1879 28

VII. SCHIAPARELLI. 1881 29

VIII. SCHIAPARELLI. 1884 29

IX. LOWELL. 1894 30

X. LOWELL. 1896 30

XI. LOWELL. 1901 31

XII. LOWELL. 1905 31

SOUTH POLAR CAP. 1905 42

NORTH POLAR CAP. 1905 44

MARE ERYTHRAEUM, MARTIAN DATE, DECEMBER 30 120

MARE ERYTHRAEUM, MARTIAN DATE, JANUARY 16 122

MARE ERYTHRAEUM, MARTIAN DATE, FEBRUARY 1 124

MARE ERYTHRAEUM, MARTIAN DATE, FEBRUARY 21 126

MARS, ON MERCATOR’S PROJECTION 384

CUTS APPEARING IN TEXT

SOUTH POLAR CAP IN WINTER 56

HELLAS IN WINTER 59

WHITE SOUTH OF NECTAR AND SOLIS LACUS 59

NORTHERN CAP HOODED WITH VAPOR 64

NORTHERN CAP UNMASKED 65

DEPOSITION OF FROST 70

FIRST NORTHERN SNOW 72

WHITE IN ELYSIUM 75

WHITE IN THE PONS HECTORIS 78

PROJECTION ON TERMINATOR 101

LINES IN DARK AREA 117

MAP OF NORTH AMERICA AT THE CLOSE OF ARCHÆAN TIME 132

NORTH AMERICA AT OPENING OF UPPER SILURIAN PERIOD 134

MAP OF NORTH AMERICA AFTER THE APPALACHIAN REVOLUTION 135

NORTH AMERICA IN THE CRETACEOUS PERIOD 136

NORTH AMERICA, SHOWING THE PARTS UNDER WATER IN THE TERTIARY ERA 137

EARTH’S DESERT AREAS, WESTERN HEMISPHERE 156

EARTH’S DESERT AREAS, EASTERN HEMISPHERE 157

SHOWING THE EUMENIDES-ORCUS 183

MARTIAN DOUBLES 206

MARTIAN DOUBLES 207

MOUTHS OF EUPHRATES AND PHISON. JUNE, 1903 219

PECULIAR DEVELOPMENT OF THE GANGES 228

DJIHOUN, THE NARROWEST DOUBLE 229

THE SABAEUS SINUS, EMBOUCHURE FOR THE DOUBLE HIDDEKEL AND GIHON 232

THE PROPONTIS, 1905 247

FONS IMMORTALIS, JUNE 19 254

UTOPIA REGIO. 1903 256

ASCRAEUS LUCUS AND GIGAS. MARCH 2, 1903 258

PECULIAR ASSOCIATION OF THE LUCI ISMENII WITH DOUBLE CANALS 260

LUCUS ISMENIUS. MARCH, 1903 262

SHOWING SEASONAL CHANGE. I 285

SHOWING SEASONAL CHANGE. II 285

MEAN CANAL CARTOUCHES 298

SHOWING DEVELOPMENT OF THE BRONTES:

I. FEBRUARY 25 306

II. MARCH 30 307

III. APRIL 3 307

IV. MAY 4 308

V. MAY 7 308

VI. JULY 18 309

CARTOUCHES OF THE BRONTES 311

AMENTHES ALONE IN FEBRUARY 319

AMENTHES FEEBLER AND STILL ALONE IN MARCH 319

APPEARANCE OF THOTH WITH TRITON AND CURVED NEPENTHES. AMENTHES VANISHED, APRIL 20 320

ADVENT OF THE LUCUS MOERIS. MAY 29 321

AMENTHES WITH THOTH-NEPENTHES. JULY 322

CARTOUCHES OF AMENTHES, THOTH, AND THEIR COMBINATION 323

PHENOLOGY CURVES—EARTH 342

PHENOLOGY CURVES—MARS 343

PART I. Natural Features

NATURAL FEATURES

MARS AND ITS CANALS

CHAPTER I

ON EXPLORATION

From time immemorial travel and discovery have called with strange insistence to him who, wondering on the world, felt adventure in his veins. The leaving familiar sights and faces to push forth into the unknown has with magnetic force drawn the bold to great endeavor and fired the thought of those who stayed at home. Spur to enterprise since man first was, this spirit has urged him over the habitable globe. Linked in part to mere matter of support it led the more daring of the Aryans to quit the shade of their beech trees, reposeful as that umbrage may have been, and wander into Central Asia, so to perplex philologists into believing them to have originated there; it lured Columbus across the waste of waters and caused his son to have carved upon his tomb that ringing couplet of which the simple grandeur still stirs the blood:—

Á CASTILLA Y Á LEON NUEVO MONDO DIÓ COLON;

(To Castile and Leon beyond the wave Another world Columbus gave;)

it drove the early voyagers into the heart of the vast wilderness, there to endure all hardship so that they might come where their kind had never stood before; and now it points man to the pole.

Something of the selfsame spirit finds a farther field today outside the confines of our traversable earth. Science which has caused the world to shrink and dwindle has been no less busy bringing near what in the past seemed inaccessibly remote. Beyond our earth man’s penetration has found it possible to pierce, and in its widening circle of research has latterly been made aware of another world of strange enticement across the depths of space. Planetary distances, not mundane ones, are here concerned, and the globe to be explored, though akin to, is yet very different from, our own. This other world is the planet Mars. Sundered from us by the ocean of ether, a fellow-member of our own community of matter there makes its circuit of the sun upon whose face features show which stamp it as cognate to that on which we live. In spite of the millions of miles of intervening matterless void, upon it markings can be made out that distantly resemble our earth’s topography and grow increasingly suggestive as vision shapes them better; and yet among the seemingly familiar reveal aspects which are completely strange. But more than this: over the face of it sweep changes that show it to be not a dead but a living world, like ours in this, and luring curiosity by details unknown here to further exploration of its unfamiliar ground.

To observe Mars is to embark upon this enterprise; not in body but in mind. Though parted by a gulf more impassable than any sea, the telescope lets us traverse what otherwise had been barred and lands us at last above the shores we went forth to seek. Real the journey is, though incorporeal in kind. Since the seeing strange sights is the essence of all far wanderings, it is as truly travel so the eye arrive as if the body kept it company. Indeed, sight is our only far viatic sense. Touch and taste both hang on contact, smell stands indebted to the near and even hearing waits on ponderable matter where sound soon dissipates away; only sight soars untrammeled of the grosser adjunct of the flesh to penetrate what were otherwise unfathomable space.

What the voyager thus finds himself envisaging shares by that very fact in the expansion of the sense that brought him there. No longer tied by means of transport to seas his sails may compass or lands his feet may tread, the traveler reaches a goal removed in kind from his own habitat. He proves to have adventured, not into unknown parts of a known world, but into one new to him in its entirety. In extent alone he surveys what dwarfs the explorer’s conquests on Earth. But size is the least of the surprises there in store for him. What confronts his gaze finds commonly no counterpart on Earth. His previous knowledge stands him in scant stead. For he faces what is so removed from every day experience that analogy no longer offers itself with safety as a guide. He must build up new conceptions from fresh data and slowly proceed to deduce the meaning they may contain. Science alone can help him to interpretation of what he finds, and above all must he wean himself from human prejudice and earthbound limitation. For he deals here with ultramundane things. With just enough of cosmogony in common to make decipherment not despairable this world is yet so different from the one he personally knows as to whet curiosity at every turn. He is permitted to perceive what piques inquiry and by patient adding of point to point promises at last a rational result.

Like mundane exploration, it is arduous too; ad astra per aspera is here literally true. For it is a journey not devoid of hardship and discomfort by the way. Its starting-point preludes as much. To get conditions proper for his work the explorer must forego the haunts of men and even those terrestrial spots found by them most habitable. Astronomy now demands bodily abstraction of its devotee. Its deities are gods that veil themselves amid man-crowded marts and impose withdrawal and seclusion for the prosecution of their cult as much as any worshiped for other reason in more primeval times. To see into the beyond requires purity; in the medium now as formerly in the man. As little air as may be and that only of the best is obligatory to his enterprise, and the securing it makes him perforce a hermit from his kind. He must abandon cities and forego plains. Only in places raised above and aloof from men can he profitably pursue his search, places where nature never meant him to dwell and admonishes him of the fact by sundry hints of a more or less distressing character. To stand a mile and a half nearer the stars is not to stand immune.

Continue reading Mars and Its Canals free in the Wunder reader →