THE STRANGE MARKINGS ON MARS. 55 



tion. But even granting the existence of such a race of Goliaths 

 on our neighbor world, it is not conceivable that they could have 

 constructed a system of tremendous canals over half the surface 

 of their planet, or that they would have done it if they could. 

 The canals of Mars are enormously disproportioned in magnitude 

 to the most gigantic inhabitants that a due regard for the law 

 of gravitation would suffer us to imagine there. 



An ingenious Frenchman has considerately and considerably 

 diminished the difficulty for the inhabitants of Mars by the sug- 

 gestion that the continents of that planet are so slightly elevated 

 above the level of its seas that frequent and periodical inunda- 

 tions occur over large areas, thus forming temporary channels of 

 communication between the seas which leave only the more ele- 

 vated points above water to serve as places of refuge for the non- 

 aquatic inhabitants. According to the theory, these inhabitants, 

 possessing a horse sense comparable to that of the descendants of 

 Noah, have, in the course of ages, improved and strengthened 

 their natural places of refuge in times of flood, by excavating the 

 ground from the low lands periodically invaded by the sea, and 

 piling it up on the higher places, thus producing lines of partly 

 artificial hills geometrically placed, and with talus-like flanks. 



It will be observed that these attempts at explanation make 

 no reference to the duplication of the canals. Mr. Proctor, always 

 fertile in ingenious theories, undertook to include this strange 

 transformation in an explanation of the canals which he suggest- 

 ed ; namely, that they are great rivers, over and along which, in 

 certain seasons, vast fog-banks are formed, or which, perhaps, 

 being frozen in winter, remain covered with snow and ice in 

 spring until the snow is melted along their banks, so that by a 

 phenomenon of diffraction the image of the rivers appears to us 

 as a light line between two dark ones. 



M. Fizeau has put forth a theory according to which the canals 

 of Mars are simply glacial productions, enormous crevasses and 

 clefts in the ice covering the planet, like those seen on a smaller 

 scale in our glaciers. But this theory, of course, would imply that 

 Mars is now undergoing the effects of a glacial epoch, involving 

 even the equatorial regions of the planet, while, as a matter of 

 fact, the surface of Mars appears not to suffer from any extreme 

 degree of cold. Attention has also been called to a fancied 

 resemblance between the rectilineal canal system of Mars and the 

 systems of rays seen on the moon, especially that which has its 

 center at the crater Tycho, and which, under certain illumina- 

 tions, is one of the most conspicuous features of the lunar surface. 



In fact, it may be said, in a double sense, that there is no end 

 of speculations on this curious subject. But nothing has yet been 

 proposed that covers all the appearances presented, and even a 



