Showing the Eumenides-Orcus.
On the other hand, the length of the canals is relatively enormous. With them 2000 miles is common; while many exceed 2500, and the Eumenides-Orcus is 3540 miles from the point where it leaves the Phœnix Lake to the point where it enters the Trivium Charontis. This means much more on Mars than it would on Earth, owing to the smaller size of the planet. Such a length exceeds a third of the whole circumference of its globe at the equator. But what is still more remarkable, throughout the whole of the long course taken by the canal, it swerves neither to the right nor to the left of the great circle joining the two points.
Of these several peculiarities of the individual canal it is difficult to know to which to allot the palm for oddity,—great circle directness, excessive length, want of width, or striking uniformity. Each is so anomalously unnatural as to have received the approving stamp of incredulity. Yet so much, wonderful as it is, is encountered on the very threshold of the subject.
| [2] | M. l’abbé Moreux. |
| [3] | As some misrepresentation has been made on this subject through misapprehension of the writer’s observations on Venus and Mercury, it may be well to state that the tenuous markings on both these other planets entirely lack the unnatural regularity distinguishing the canals of Mars. The Venusian lines are hazy, ill-defined, and non-uniform; the Mercurian broken and irregular, suggesting cracks. Neither resemble the Martian in marvelous precision, and have never been called canals by the writer nor by Schiaparelli, but solely by those who have not seen them and have misapprehended their character and look. |