24 JOURNAL AND PROCEEDINGS. 



Mars its men are giants and are fifty times as effective and can 

 do fifty times as much work, so that the task of excavating- 

 these wonderful ditches is easy, one Martian is as good as fifty 

 ItaKans. Life is moreover much further advanced, the arts and 

 sciences are thousands of years older than here on earth, and 

 the powers of nature being better understood more gigantic 

 results can be produced. Steam and electrical machinery are 

 long out of date and are kept in museums as relics of a by-gone 

 civilization, and so the rein is given to the most fervid imagin- 

 ation, and the grandest results flow easily. Even good Schia- 

 parelli is quoted, speaking on the idea that the " canals " are 

 the work of intelligent beings, " I should carefully refrain," he 

 says, " from combating this supposition which involves no im- 

 probability." 



But Schiaparelli was a philosopher and was not lecturing 

 to a Boston audience or writing for the Atlantic Monthly, or 

 he would have put it positively and not negatively. The Lick 

 Observatory authorities are singularly unappreciative ; they 

 exhibit little real enterprise, or the air at Mount Hamilton is not 

 so exciting as that of Flagstaff. This is what Prof, Edward S. 

 Holden coldly writes : " Something is seen no doubt, but I may 

 say that nothing has been observed at Lick Observatory during 

 1888- 1895, so far as I know, which goes to confirm the verj^ 

 positive and strange conclusions here described. It is a point to 

 be noted that the conclusions reached by Mr. Lowell at the end 

 of his work agree remarkably with the facts he set out to prove 

 before his observatory was established at all." Conjecture, 

 however, is often the pilot of discovery. Let us suspend our 

 judgment until w^e hear from the Yerke's telescope at Lake 

 Geneva, 40 inch, near Chicago, working under the best atmos- 

 pheric conditions, next spring, or until the projected monster 

 at Paris in 1900 verifies, if it will, Mr. Lowell's ingenious antici- 

 pations. We may add that to explain the mysterious gemina- 

 tion or doubling of the canals so far has defied the most labored 

 efforts of the Flagstaff observers. 



And so the years roll onwards and scientific discovery 

 closes one volume to open another and yet another. We see at 



