Which of these two hemispheres would be the worse abode, is matter of personal predilection; dust or glacier, deserts both. Everlasting unshielded noon would cause a wind circulation from all points of the enlightened periphery to the centre, whence a funnel-shaped current would rise to overflow back into the antipodes, thence to return by the horizon again. As the night side would be several hundred degrees at least colder than the noon one, all the moisture would be evaporated on the sunlit hemisphere, to be carried round and deposited as ice on the other, there to stay. Life would be either toasted or frappé. A Sahara backed by polar regions would be the obverse and the reverse of the shield.
October 15, 1896.
February 12, 1897.
March 26, 1897.
Venus—Drawings by Dr. Lowell showing agreement at different distances.
The reader may deem the picture a fancy sketch which possibly may not appeal to him. Nevertheless, it not only is possible, but one which has overtaken our nearest of neighbors. To this pass the Mater Amorum, Venus herself, has already been brought. She betrays it by the wrinkles which modern observation has revealed upon her face. Innocent critics, with a gallantry one would hardly have credited them,—which shows how one may wrong even the humblest of creatures,—have denied the existence of these marks of age, on the chivalrous a priori assumption that it could not possibly be true because never seen before. Their negation, in naïve ignorance of the facts, partakes the logic of the gallant captain, who, when asked by a lady to guess her age, replied: “’Pon my word, I haven’t the slightest idea,” hastily adding, “But you don’t look it!” Less commendable than this conventional nescience, but unfortunately more to the point, is the evidence of prying scientific curiosity. Shrewdly divined as much as detected by Schiaparelli, made more certain by the crow’s-feet disclosed at Flagstaff, and corroborated by the testimony of the spectroscope there, her isochronism of rotation and revolution lies beyond a doubt. Attraction to her lord has conquered at last her who was the cynosure of all. Venus, in her old age, stares forever at the Sun, and we all know how ill an aging beauty can support a garish light.