Mars and Its Canals

by Percival Lowell

That they are thus ancillary as well as coexistent today leads us to confront for them a community of origin in the past; and further study confirms the inference. Both paleontology and entomology, or the science of the aged and the science of the young, prove such ancestry to be a fact. By going back from the present into the past, or, what amounts to substantially the same thing, by descending in the scale of life to the lowest known forms of organism, we find proof of concomitance, cogent because congenital. At the time when inorganic chemical compounds first passed by evolution into organic ones, the change was of so general a character that even such tardy representatives of it as survive today tax erudition to tell to which of the two great kingdoms they belong, the vegetal or the animal. Simplest and most primitive of known organisms are the chromacea, unnucleated single cells as Haeckel has shown, and next to them in order come many of the bacteria, also of simple unnucleated plasm. So little do the majority of the bacteria differ morphologically from the chromacea, that on the score of structure the two are not to be catalogued apart. Both are as elemental as anything well can be, which only their diet serves to divide. Each is an organism without organs, thus belying the dictionary definition of both animals and plants. Etymologically they are not organic yet manifestly are alive, and only in their action are unlike. The chromacea are plasm-forming beings, and therefore they are plants; the bacteria are plasm-eating beings, and so are animals. Even this distinction is not always preserved. As Haeckel tells us: “the nitro-bacteria which dwell in the earth having the vegetal property of converting ammonia by oxidation into nitrous acid and this into nitric acid, using as their source of carbon the carbonic acid gas of the atmosphere. They feed, like the chromacea, on simple inorganic compounds.” Here, then, we have, close to the threshold of organic life, unorganized organisms, roughly speaking coeval and differing in a sense but little, either of them, from inorganic crystals; and yet the one is an animal, the other a plant. Progenitors of the two great divisions of life, they were themselves concomitantly evolved, either side by side or as offshoots both of a common stock. Now, if the ancestors of the two great organic kingdoms were thus simultaneously produced here, we are warranted in believing that they would similarly be produced elsewhere, given conditions suitably alike. In consequence, if we detect the presence of the one, we already have an argument for inferring the other. Not to complete our syllogism would be to flaunt a lack of logic in nature’s face.

Rationally viewed, then, the general problem of life in other worlds reduces itself to a question of conditions. Since certain physical results follow inevitably upon certain physical premises, if we can assure ourselves of the proper premises we may look to nature for their conclusion. A priori, then, the possibility of life becomes one of habitat. If the environment be suitable life will ensue. What makes for such a mediary milieu is, like most cosmic processes, in its fundamentals of interesting simplicity; for the production of a proper nidus depends primarily upon the mere size of the body parentally concerned. If a planet be big enough it will inevitably bring forth life, because of conditions suitable to its generating; if too small it will remain sterile to the end of time.

That size should be the determining factor whether a planet shall be fecund or barren may seem at first thought strange. Yet that it is so admits of no rational doubt. All that we see of bodies about us shows its truth, and what we have learnt of cosmic process enables us in some sort to discern why. In order for evolution, such as we mark it upon the earth, to be possible, the parent body must have been at one time at a high temperature, since only under great heat can the primal processes occur. But for this generation of caloric the aggregate mass of the particles, the falling together of which makes the planet, and their stoppage its internal heat, must be large. The sun’s rays alone are insufficient to cause the necessary temperature; the heat must come from within, though it be helped from without. Even here the action is abetted by a large body. For a planet to entrap the sun’s rays or even to preserve its own internal warmth, an atmosphere is needed, and it takes a large body to retain an atmospheric covering sufficiently long. Yet without it not only would there be no suitable state, but no medium in which organic or even inorganic reactions could go on. Lastly, water, the essential nidus for the organism’s early stages, has its presence similarly conditioned. For this, like the atmosphere, would from a small body speedily vanish away. Thus the planet itself is the life-producing body, although the sun furthers the process when once begun.

That the needed substances are planetarily present, what we know of the distribution of matter astronomically sufficiently attests. What we find in meteorites shows that the catastrophe which preceded our present solar system’s birth scattered its elemental constituents throughout its domain, and thus when they came to be gathered up again into planets that these must have been materially the same. The manner, not the matter, then, is alone that about which we are concerned.

Now, if the mass of matter gravitating together to form a planet be sufficient to produce the proper inorganic conditions, the organic must follow as a matter of course. That the organic springs from the inorganic is not only shown by what has taken place on earth, but is the necessary logical deduction from its decay back into the inorganic again. As Nägeli admirably observes: “The origin of the organic from the inorganic is, in the first place, not a question of experience and experiment, but a fact deduced from the law of the constancy of matter and force. If all things in the material world are causally related, if all phenomena proceed on natural principles, organisms which are formed of and decay into the same matter must have been derived originally from inorganic compounds.”

The original oneness of the two, the fact that the organic sprang from the inorganic, is shown by the cousinly closeness of the lowest organic with the highest inorganic substances. The monera are suggestive of crystals in their uniformity of structure. Both are homogeneous or approximately so. Again, both grow by taking from what they come in contact with that which they find suitable and so add to their body by homogeneous accretion. Finally, when grown too large for single life, they part into similar crystals or split into identical cells. The difference between the division of the crystal and the fission of the cell is small in kind; much less than that later differentiation in genesis into parthenogenesis and sexual reproduction. Yet here we unhesitatingly trace an assured relationship. It were straining at a gnat to swallow a camel to doubt it in the other.

Just as the two behave analogically alike in their own action, so do they observe a like attitude toward nature. They thus point to their common origin. The monera are resemblant of chemical compounds in their superiority to external influences. To outward conditions of temperature and humidity the chromacea are much as sticks and stones. Some species may remain for long frozen in ice, Haeckel observes, and yet wake to activity so soon as it thaws. Others may be completely desiccated, and then resume their life when put in water after a lapse of several years. Thus both in their deathlike lives and in their living immortality the chromacea are close to inorganic things.

From preference, however, these lowest forms of life affect what to us would be unbearable temperatures. Many of the chromacea live in hot springs at temperatures of 123° to 176° Fahrenheit, in which no other, that is, no higher, organism can dwell. This choice of habitat is in line with the other details of their evolutionary career. For it, too, is in keeping with the conditions of crystalline growth, halfway as it were on the road to them; the forming of crystals beginning at a temperature higher still. And we perceive from it that the passing of the inorganic into the organic is brought about by a lowering of the temperature of the parent planet. This again, is in line with the evolution of chemical complexity. Let the heat become less, and higher and higher chemical compounds, finally the organic ones, become possible. That evolution is nothing else than such a gradually increasing chemical synthesis is forced on one by study of the facts. Once started, life, as paleontology shows, develops along both the floral and the faunal lines side by side, taking on complexity with time. It begins so soon as secular cooling has condensed water vapor to its liquid state; chromacea and confervæ coming into being high up toward the boiling-point. Then, with lowering temperature come the seaweeds and the rhizopods, then the land plants and the lunged vertebrates. Hand in hand the fauna and flora climb to more intricate perfecting, life rising as temperature lowers.

We perceive then that, considered a priori, the possibility of life on a planet is merely a question of the planet’s size; and then pursuantly that the character of that life is a matter of the planet’s age. But age again is a question of size. For the smaller its mass the quicker the body cools, and with a planet, growing cold means growing old. Within the bounds that make life possible, the smaller the body the quicker it ages and the more advanced its denizens must be. Just how far the advance goes we may not assert dogmatically in a given case, since not relative age alone but absolute time as well is concerned in it. It may be that nature’s processes cannot be hurried, and that for want of time development may in part be missed. But from general considerations the limit of the time needed seems well within most planetary careers.

Now, the aspect of the surface of Mars shows that both these conditions have been fulfilled. Mars is large enough to have begotten vegetation and small enough to be already old. All that we know of the physical state of the planet points to the possibility of both vegetal and animal life existing there, and furthermore, that this life should be of a relatively high order is possible. Nothing contradicts this, and the observations of the last ten years have rendered the conclusion then advanced only the more conclusive. Even the evidence of the past state of the planet confirms that given by its present one. That with us life came out of the seas finds its possible parallel in the fact that seas seem once to have existed there, leaving their mark discernible to-day. Life, then, had there as here the wherewith to begin. That we find air and water in both shows that it had the means to continue once begun. That it then ran a like course is further witnessed by what we now detect. The necessary premises, then, are there. More than this. One half of the conclusion, vegetal life, gives evidence of itself.