A river, as Nature has made it, wends its way to and fro; it never takes the shortest route from one point to another; the width of the river is incessantly changing; sometimes it expands into a lake, sometimes it divides so as to inclose an island. If we could discern through our telescopes a winding line such as I have described on Mars it might perhaps represent a river.
But suppose, instead of a winding line, there was a perfectly straight line, or rather a great circle on the globe drawn as straight as a surveyor could lay it out—if we beheld an object like that on Mars I think we should certainly infer that it was not a river made in the ordinary course of natural operations; no natural river ever runs in that regular fashion. If such a straight line were indeed a river, then it must have been designedly straightened by human agency or by some other intelligent agency for some particular purpose. In its larger features Nature does not work by straight lines. A long and perfectly straight object, if found on our earth, might be a canal or it might be a road; it might be a railway or a terrace of some kind; but assuredly no one would expect it to be a natural object.
We have the testimony of Schiaparelli, now strengthened by that of Mr. Lowell and his assistants, that there are many straight lines of this kind on Mars. They appear to be just as straight as a railway would have to be if laid across the flat and boundless prairie, where the engineer encountered no obstacle whatever to make him swerve from the direct path. These lines on Mars run for hundreds of miles, sometimes, indeed, I should say for thousands of miles. They are far wider than any terrestrial river, except perhaps the Amazon for a short part of its course. The lines on Mars are about forty miles wide. Indeed, the planet is so distant that if these lines were much narrower than forty miles they would be invisible. Each of them is marvelous in its uniformity throughout its entire length.
The existence of these straight lines on the planet contains perhaps the first suggestion of the presence of some intelligent beings on Mars. The mere occurrence of a number of perfectly straight, uniform lines on such a globe would in itself be a sufficiently remarkable circumstance. But there are other features exhibited by these objects which also suggest the astonishing surmise that they have been constructed by some intelligent beings for some intelligent purposes.
Sometimes two of these lines will start from a certain junction, sometimes there will be a third or a fourth from the same junction; in one case there are as many as seven radiating from the same point. Such an arrangement of these straight lines is certainly unlike anything that we find in Nature. We are led to seek for some other explanation of the phenomenon, and here is the explanation which Mr. Lowell offers:
It has recently been found that there are no oceans of water on the planet Mars. In earlier days it used no doubt to be believed that the dark marks easily seen in the telescope could represent nothing but oceans, but I think we must now give up the notion that these are watery expanses. Indeed, there is not much water on that globe anywhere in comparison with the abundance of water on our earth. It is the scarcity of water which seems to give a clew to some of the mysteries discovered on Mars by Schiaparelli and Lowell.
As our earth moves round the sun we have, of course, the changing seasons of the year. In a somewhat similar manner Mars revolves around the sun, and accordingly this planet has also its due succession of seasons. There is a summer on Mars, and there is a winter; during the winter on that globe the poles of the planet are much colder than at other seasons, and the water there accumulates in the form of ice or snow to make those ice-caps that telescopic observers have so long noticed. In this respect Mars, of course, is like our earth. The ice-cap at each pole of our globe is so vast that even the hottest summer does not suffice to melt the accumulation; much of the ice and snow there remains to form the eternal snow which every arctic explorer so well knows. It would seem, however, that the contrast between winter and summer on Mars must be much more deeply marked than the contrast between winter and summer on our earth. During the summer of Mars ice and snow vanish altogether from the poles of that planet.
Mr. Lowell supposes that water is so scarce on Mars that the inhabitants have found it necessary to economize to the utmost whatever stock there may be of this most necessary element. The observations at Flagstaff tend to show that the dark lines on Mars mark the course of the canals by which the water melted in summer in the arctic regions is conducted over the globe to the tracts where the water is wanted. Not that the line as we see it represents actually the water itself; the straight line so characteristic of Mars’s globe seems rather to correspond to the zones of vegetation which are brought into culture by means of water that flows along a canal in its center. In much the same way would the course of the Nile be exhibited to an inhabitant on Mars who was directing a telescope toward this earth: the river itself would not be visible, but the cultivated tracts which owe their fertility to the irrigation from the river would be broad enough to be distinguishable. The appearance of these irrigated zones would vary, of course, with the seasons; and we observe, as might have been expected, changes in the lines on Mars corresponding to the changes in the seasons of the planet.
A noteworthy development of astronomy in the last century has been the erection of mighty telescopes for the study of the heavens. It must here suffice to mention, as the latest and most remarkable of these, the famous instrument at the Yerkes Observatory, which belongs to the University of Chicago. Just as the century is drawing to its close, the Yerkes telescope has begun to enter on its sublime task of exhibiting the heavens under greater advantages than have ever been previously afforded to any astronomers since the world began.
The University of Chicago having been recently founded, it was desired to associate with the university an astronomical observatory which should be worthy of the astonishing place that this wonderful city has assumed in the world’s history. Mr. Yerkes, an American millionaire, generously undertook to provide the cost of this observatory. Two noble disks of glass, forty inches in diameter, were produced at the furnaces of Messrs. Mantois, in Paris; these disks were worked by Mr. Alvan Clark, of Boston, into the famous object glass which, weighing nearly half a ton, has now been mounted in what we may describe as a temple or a palace such as had never been dreamed of before in the whole annals of astronomy.