20 JOURNAL AND PROCEEDINGS. 



planet and in some cases appearing in couples. He used a glass 

 oi 8}j, inches. The world, however, was anything but pre- 

 pared for the revelation, and when he announced what he had 

 seen promptly proceeded to disbelieve him. Even to this day 

 the large 26 inch glass at Washington refuses to show these 

 canals. Schiaparelli had the misfortune to be ahead of his time 

 and the yet greater misfortune to remain so. For not only did 

 no one else see the lines at that opposition, but no one else suc- 

 ceeded in doing so at subsequent ones. For many years fate 

 allowed Schiaparelli to have them all to himself, a confidence 

 he amply repaid. While others doubted, he went on from dis- 

 covery to discovery. What he had seen in 1877 was not so 

 very startling in view of what he afterwards saw. His first 

 observations might well have been of simple estuaries, long 

 natural creeks running up into the continents and ever cutting 

 them in two. His later observations were too peculiar to be 

 explained even by so improbable a configuration of the Martian 

 surface. In 1879 the " Canalli^'' as he called them, showed 

 straighter and narrower than they had in 1S77, thus, not in 

 consequence of any change in them, but from his own improved 

 facvilty of detection, for what the eye has once seen it can al- 

 ways see better a second time. As he gazed they appeared 

 eight straighter and he made out more. Lastly, toward the end 

 of the year, he observed one evening what struck even him as 

 a startling phenomenon, the twining of one of the canals, two 

 parallel canals suddenly showed where but a single one had 

 showed before. The paralleling was so perfect that he suspect- 

 ed an optical illusion. He could, however, discover none by 

 changing his telescopes or eye pieces. The phenomenon ap- 

 parently was real. At the next opposition he looked to see if 

 by chance he shovild mark a repetition of the strange event 

 and then he saw twenty of them double. This capped the 

 climax to his own wonderment and it is needless to add to other 

 people's incredulity, for nobody else had yet succeeded in see- 

 ing the canals at all let alone seeing them double. And now 

 we have a map of Mars, drawn as our earth maps are on Mer- 

 cator's projection, showing regions, canals and oases, all regu- 



