The Planet Mars : a Fragment. 183 



obstacles of a grave character, and at length my series of 

 sketches, a great proportion of which were of a rough, imperfect 

 nature, were found to combine into a delineation, of which 

 some parts were especially unsatisfactory. Nevertheless, I have 

 not felt disposed to suppress my results, because I have thought 

 that they may prove interesting to other observers not more 

 successful than myself, and because I believe that, notwith- 

 standing all their shortcomings, they sufficiently establish the 

 two points I had especially in view — the permanency of the 

 principal configurations of the planet, and their occasional 

 obscuration from some transitory cause. For this purpose, 

 however, a reference to former observations would obviously 

 be essential; and here considerable difficulty arose. My 

 original intention was to have given an extended selection from 

 all the previous designs to which I could obtain access, but I 

 was subsequently led to prefer a comparison with the work of 

 Beer and Madler alone, as a well-known and accredited 

 authority, and fully sufficient for my purpose ; and hence I have 

 not availed myself of some obliging offers of assistance from 

 contemporary observers; partial illustration of this nature 

 tending to produce confusion in a somewhat perplexing subject, 

 whose complete elucidation must be given, if at all, from a more 

 comprehensive point of view. Having made choice of Beer 

 and Madler as my standard of comparison, I thought it right, 

 in order to secure impartiality, to avoid looking at their designs, 

 and indeed almost any others, during the whole course of my 

 observations ; and as I had not previously referred to their work 

 for a long time, I was enabled to escape any bias either of the 

 eye or the judgment. However defective my result may 

 appear, it has at any rate been attained by an independent 

 procedure. 



A superficial comparison of the published views of Mars 

 would be likely to lead to the idea that, with occasional generic 

 resemblances, such as exist in the case of the belts of Jupiter, 

 the differences are too wide and too irreconcilable to be 

 accounted for on the supposition that we see the permanent 

 features of the planet. But many circumstances would require 

 to be taken into consideration before such a conclusion would 

 be admissible. We have to bear in miud the minuteness of 

 our object : the globe of Mars is but about twice as large as 

 the Moon, and its distance towards forty millions of miles ; so 

 that Beer and Madler found it desirable to employ a power of 

 three hundred to develope its details satisfactorily, and even 

 with this they only unfolded themselves gradually to the eye. 

 A lower power I found indeed adequate, but with an aperture 

 giving me about half as much more light ; and when the weather 

 would admit of it, was glad to follow their example. Again, 



