In the closing decade of the nineteenth century, Mr Percival Lowell
took up the work where Schiaparelli had virtually dropped it, and soon
added a great number of ``canals'' to those previously known, so that
in his charts the surface of the wonderful little planet appears
covered as with a spider's web, the dusky lines criss-crossing in
every direction, with conspicuous knots wherever a number of them come
together. Mr Lowell has demonstrated that the areas originally called
seas, and thus named on the earlier charts, are not bodies of water,
whatever else they may be. He has also found that the mysterious lines
do not, as Schiaparelli supposed, begin and end at the edges of the
dusky regions, but often continue on across them, reaching in some
cases far up into the polar regions. But Schiaparelli was right in his
observation that the appearance of the ``canals'' is synchronous with
the gradual disappearance of the polar snows, and this fact has become
the basis of the most extraordinary theory that the subject of life in
other worlds has ever given birth to.

Now, the effect of such discoveries, as we have related, depends upon
the type of mind to whose attention they are called. Many are content
to accept them as strange and inexplicable at present, and to wait for
further light upon them; others insist upon an immediate inquiry
concerning their probable nature and meaning. Such an inquiry can only
be based upon inference proceeding from analogy. Mars, say Mr Lowell
and those who are of his opinion, is manifestly a solidly incrusted
planet like the earth; it has an atmosphere, though one of great
rarity; it has water vapor, as the snows in themselves prove; it has
the alternation of day and night, and a succession of seasons closely
resembling those of the earth; its surface is suggestively divided
into regions of contrasting colors and appearance, and upon that