190 



Popular Science Monthly 



In the canals Professor Lowell sees 

 the life-lines of the planet. They are to 

 him great irrigating trenches which con- 



The relative sizes of the moon and of direct 

 Mars photographs are shown by these two 

 circles. The size of the moon to the naked 

 eye is indicated by the circle to the left; 

 the circle to the right indicates the size of 

 a direct Mars photograph before enlarge- 

 ment. This disposes of the usual conten- 

 tion that the Mars photographs made at 

 Flagstaff are no larger than pinheads 



duct the water of the melting snows to 

 fertile fields thousands of miles away. 



The Canals Are Irrigating Ditches 



No more forcible argument in favor 

 of this view can be advanced 

 than their appearance and ar- 

 rangement. Nature never 

 works with mathematical preci- 

 sion. Yet the canals have been 

 planned with mathematical fore- 

 sight. No whim governed the 

 choice of their direction. Inva- 

 riably they terminate in large 

 well-defined spots, from which 

 they radiate like spokes from the 

 hub of a wheel. If there were 

 one spot, or even two spots, to 

 which a pair of lines converge, 

 we might look on the phenome- 

 non as one of the natural fea- 

 tures of the planet. But when 

 more than a dozen lines run with 

 geometrical directness to a sin- 

 gle spot, and, when, moreover, 

 the spots themselves are connect- 

 ed by lines and are in no sense 

 isolated, we must assume that an 

 intelligence has been at work. 



Aptly enough the spots and 

 lines are distributed in the very 

 regions where we should expect 

 a Martian engineer to place 

 them; in other words just where 



water is needed. Were it not for their 

 staggering length (fifteen hundred to 

 four thousand miles), we should never 

 see the canals at all. Viewed from a dis- 

 tance of more than thirty-five million 

 miles even so large a city as Chicago or 

 London would be no larger than the head 

 of a pin. W^hat we see is not really a 

 waterway, but, as Dr. Pickering and Dr. 

 Lowell has pointed out, the vegetation 

 that fringes its banks. 



Curiously enough, the canals disappear 

 at intervals, only to reappear with their 

 old clearness. On the face of it this 

 would seem in itself an unanswerable 

 refutation to any theory which assumes 

 that the canals are irrigating ditches. It 

 would be absurd for a hypothetical race 

 of Martians to dig canals periodically, 

 only to fill them again. But Dr. Lowell 

 explains the disappearance very simply. 

 What we see is but the sea- 

 sonal growth of the vegeta- l^rl^^^. 



. . -Ill T"- «-" iidKcu eye 



tion along the banks, i mie 

 is required for the water 

 of the polar seas to make 



The relative visible sizes of the moon and Mars. 

 In the small circle is a photograph of the moon 

 (the size which it appears to the naked eye). In 

 the large circle, is a drawing of Mars exactly 

 the size which it appears through the telescope 

 with a power of 392 diameters — the lowest used 



