MARS IN HIS ICY CUIRASS 101 



the existence of a great and extended community some- 

 where in the more favorable climatic sections. 



5. I am tempted to ask, Is it a mark of capacity, 

 or of stupidity, to conduct irrigating canals into the 

 deeps of an ocean bed assumed to be fertile, and then, at 

 the cost of tremendous labor and resource, to raise them 

 to the heights of the further shore for the purpose of 

 irrigating alleged deserts? 



6. Since these canals appear to be feasible every- 

 where, why did it not occur to the Solons of the planet 

 to surround the snow supply with a belt line, and thus 

 save themselves the manifestly useless task of boring a 

 multiplicity of canals through countless miles of what 

 must be hard-frozen soil? 



7. And has Prof. Lowell in his zeal really succeed- 

 ed in misleading himself into the belief that, given suf- 

 ficient ice-water, vegetation in the arctic zones would 

 proceed as speedily as in the tropics? His own words 

 leave no room for doubt that such is his meaning. For, 

 obsessed by his theory, he proceeds, in close logical se- 

 quence, to describe how first the coming sun thaws the 

 snow-cap, then how the water is made to descend by arti- 

 ficial aid toward the equator in the' timed flow of 51 

 miles daily for the huge distance of 3300 miles, and how, 

 in precise step with this flow, the canals, beginning with 

 the uppermost in latitude, successively darken with the 

 revived growth of vegetation. Dramatically he con- 

 trasts the regular poleward trend of our sprouting sea- 

 sons with the reversed order on Mars, and seems to de- 

 rive a discoverer's elation from the circumstance that 

 one is as regular and sequential as the other! Now, 

 there are three conclusive answers to this pretty demon- 

 stration, which Mr. Lowell, for the sake of his pet idea, 

 studiously ignores. One is, that unless Mars is very 

 much hotter than our earth, the frost in the latitude 



