Makch 1, 1895.] 



KNOWLEDGE 



55 



The name of Tammuz occurs also in other incantations, 

 in one of which he is called En-mirsi, fi'om which it may 

 be surmised that he was patron-god of Lagash, an ancient 

 city upon the Shatt-al-Hai, at present known as Tell-loh, 

 from which site M. de Sarzec obtained many fine and very 

 remarkable sculptures, now in the Louvre. One of the 

 (bilingual) lists of gods mentions a deity called " Tammuz 

 of the Abyss," with the explanation that he was one of 

 the six sons of £a, the god of seas, rivers, and of un- 

 fathomable wisdom. Taking this in connection with the 

 first extract from the lamentations for Tammuz (quoted 

 above), where he is called " lord of Hades," it would seem 

 that he was really regarded as the consort of the queen of 

 that region during his yearly six months' stay in " the 

 land of the dead. " 



Planners and customs have changed much in " the 

 changeless East " since the legend and lamentations for 

 Tammuz, translated above, were written.* The spread of 

 Christianity and Jlohammedanism was the death-blow to 

 all the legends of the ancient gods — they live again only by 

 the resurrection of the ancient literature of Babylonia and 

 Assyria. Women no longer seek 

 the body of " the faithful son," 

 near Gebal, and lament his un- 

 timely death ; and the temple of 

 Yahwah at Jerusalem, in which 

 holy place Hebrew women of old 

 imitated their sisters of Syria, 

 exists no longer. The land of 

 Akkad, where the legends, lamen- 

 tations and incantations referring 

 to Tammuz seem to have had 

 their origin, is no more ; and the 

 two towers of Agade, its capital, 

 which were dedicated to Tam- 

 muz, probably fell into ruin years 

 before the Christian era. With 

 Sumerian legend of the lament 



suggested the fierceness and valour of the god of war, the 

 ever-open eye would be no bad symbol of the vigilance 

 which, next to courage itself, should be the characteristic 

 of tlie soldier. 



It is, however, not worth while complaining of the loss 

 of the more poetic name. It would have been hard to 

 have constructed an entire nomenclature for the planet on 

 accordant lines, and in view of the vast array of detail 

 which Schiaparelli has brought imder our notice, and of 

 the necessity for some system of names, we may well 

 gratefully accept Schiaparelli's, even if it be a trifle 

 bizarre. 



The " Lake of the Sun " then— the " Eye " of Mars- 

 is a nearly circular dark spot, some 17' of areographical 

 longitude in its greatest length, by about 14° of areo- 

 graphical latitude in its greatest breadth, say 560 mUes by 

 510 miles. Thaumasia, the bright district in the centre of 

 which it is placed, is nearly 1200 miles in diameter. In 

 actual area, therefore, the Lake of the Sun is nearly 

 twice as large as the Black Sea, whilst Thaumasia is 

 about as large as Arabia. 



Fig. 1.— Thi>"Eve" uf lliirs. as (Iravra in 1830, 1S62, and 1S77. From FlamiuM-ion's " Mar?," p. 323. 



regard to the beautiful 

 of the daughter of the 

 Moon-god, whose disrespectful enemy, with "the shoe 

 on his foot," despoiled her of all she liked best, we 

 must wait for the completion of the text from the ruins of 

 Nineveh ; and perhaps the cities of Babylonia may yield 

 treasures in the shape of duplicates that will fill the gaps. 

 Even though this, however, should never take place, the 

 preservation of the fragment now translated is, even in its 

 present incomplete state, a thing to rejoice over. 



THE "EYE" OF MARS. 



By E. W.\LTER Maundee, F.R.A.S. 



ONE of the most interesting and most easily recog- 

 nizable markings of Mars is the nearly circular 

 spot which, in the earlier days of the study of the 

 planet, was known as the " Oculus." A more 

 suitable name could not well have been chosen 

 for it, for the dark spot Hes in the centre of a slightly 

 elliptical bright district, and above this to the south 

 another dark district forms an admirable eyebrow. The 

 name, has, however, dropped out of use, having been 

 superseded by the various names adopted by successive 

 areographers. Thus, Proctor in his chart of 18G7 calls it 

 " Lockyer ,Sea " ; Green in his map of 1877 calls it 

 " Terby Sea " ; and Schiaparelli has given it the name of 

 the " Lacus Soils." Yet surely the earlier name was not 

 only appropriate to the appearance of the marking itself, 

 but suited well with the mythological and astrological 

 traditions attaching to the planet. If the ruddy hue 



* Probably before the date of Sargon of Agade — that is to say, 

 earlier than 3800 years before Christ. 



It is very necessary for us to bear these dimensions in 

 our minds, for we are otherwise apt to lose the true signi- 

 ficance of what we observe on oiu- planetary neighbour. 

 The average diameter of the Lake of the Sun when Mars is 

 at opposition is just 2" of arc ; in a favourable opposition, 

 when the southern pole of the planet is turned towards 

 the earth, and we therefore see the lake to best advantage, 

 its diameter is 2V . 



Usually, then, ft is seen as a dot — a dot sufficiently large 

 to be seen as such with quite a small instrument and a low 

 power, but a dot that requu-es unusually good conditions 

 and a high power to give much information as to the 

 details of its structure. 



We see it in its simplest form in the left-hand drawing 

 of Fig. 1, which, like the woodcuts which follow, is repro- 

 duced from M. Flammarion's superb monograph, " La 

 Planete Mars." This drawing forms part of one made by 

 Beer and Miidler on October 13th, 1830, in the course of 

 that study of the planet which enabled them to produce 

 the first chart of Mars. The telescope they employed had 

 an aperture of four inches. 



In the year 1862 ilars was again very favourably placed, 

 and Kaiser, at Leyden, made a second chart of the planet. 

 The first figure in our plate represents his drawing of 

 this region as made on October 24th of that year. This 

 opposition was also signahzed by a fine series of drawings 

 by Lockyer, pubhshed in Vol. XXXII. of the Memoirs of 

 the Roijal Astronomical SociHy, both Kaiser's and Lockyer's 

 drawings showing a great advance in detail over Beer and 

 Madler's, the later observers being armed with six-inch 

 telescopes. Lassell, Phillips, Secchi, and others were also 

 at work during this opposition, whilst the next opposition, 

 that of 1864, supplies us with the drawings of another 



