 | Mars |  |
MARS.
IV. OASES.
SUGGESTIVE of irrigation as the strange network of lines that covers the surface of Mars appears to be, the suggestion takes on more definite shape yet with the last addition to our knowledge of the planet's surface detail,—the recognition of a singularly correlated system of spots.
The canals, as we have seen, show a remarkable attachment to their kind. Not content with such casual meetings as chance would afford them in the course of their long careers, they make a point of rendezvousing as often and in as great numbers as possible. Indeed, the ingenuity with which they manage to combine unswerving rectitude with meetings by the way grows more and more marvelous, the more one studies it. The meeting-places, or junctions, evidently possess an attraction for the canals. The crossings, in fact, seem to be the end and aim of the whole system; the canals, but means to that end. So much is at once inferable from the great intrinsic improbability that such crossings can be due to chance.
The inference receives, apparently, striking verification from a something which turns out to exist at these junctions. This something shows itself as a round or ovate spot. To such spot, planted there in the midst of the desert, do the neighboring canals converge.
Dotted all over the reddish-ochre ground of the great desert stretches of the planet, the so-called continents of Mars, are an innumerable number of dark circular or ovate spots. They appear, furthermore, always in intimate association with the canals. They constitute so many hubs to which the canals make
That these two things, straight lines and roundish spots, should, with our present telescopic means, be the sole markings to appear on the vast desert regions of the planet is suggestive in itself.
Another significant fact as to the character of either marking is the manifest association of the two. In spite of the great number of the spots, not one of them stands isolate. There is not a single instance of a spot that is not connected by a canal to the rest of the dark areas. This remarkable inability to stand alone shows that the spots and the canals are not unrelated phenomena, for were there no tie between them they must occasionally exist apart.
Nor is this all. There is, apparently, no spot that is not joined to the rest of the system, not only by a canal, but by more than one; for though some spots, such as the Fountain of Youth, have appeared at first to be provided with but a single canal connection, later observation has revealed concurrence in the case. The spots are, therefore, not only part and parcel of the canal system, but terminal phenomena of the same.
They are, generally speaking, more difficult features to see than the canals. In consequence, they have been among the most recent details to be made out upon the planet's surface. It was not until 1892, at Arequipa, that they were seen in anything like their real numbers. Of them, indeed, are the forty lakes found by Professor W. H. Pickering. This year, at Flagstaff, still others have been discovered, to detection of their character, as I think.
In the first place, as I have said, there appears to be no spot that has not two or more canals running to it; in the second place, I find, reversely, that apparently no canal junction is without its spot. Such association is a most tell-tale circumstance. I believe the rule to have no exception. The more prominent junctions all show spots; and with regard to the less conspicuous ones, it is to be remembered that, as the canals are more easy to make out than the spots, the relative invisibility of the latter is to be expected. From which it would seem that the spots are fundamental features of the junctions, and that for a junction to be spotless is, from its very nature, an impossibility.
Next to their regularity of position is to be remarked their regularity of form. Their typical shape seems to be circular; for the better the atmosphere, the rounder they look. Under poor seeing they show as irregular patches smooching the disc, much as the canals themselves show as streaks; the spots differing from the canals in being thicker and not so long. As the seeing improves, the patches differentiate themselves into round dots and connecting lines. Such is the shape of the spots associated with single canals; that is, canals not double. In the case of the double canals, the spots look like rectangles with the corners rounded off. One of the most striking of all of them is the Trivium Charontis, which is nearly square.
Now it will be noticed that these shapes are as unnatural as they are definite, and that they all agree in one peculiarity: they are all convex, not concave, to the entering canals. They are not, therefore, mere enlargements of the canals, due to natural causes; for were the spots enlargements of the canals at their crossing points they should be more or less star-shaped, or concave to the canals, whereas they are round, or roundish rectangles,—that is convex to the same. Such convexity negatives, at the outset, their being purely natural outgrowths of the canals.
The majority of the spots are from
To the spot category belong all the markings other than canals to be seen anywhere on the continental deserts of the planet, from the great Lake of the Sun, which is 540 miles long by 300 miles broad, to the tiny Fountain of Youth, which is barely distinguishable as a dot. That all are fundamentally of a kind is hinted at by their shape and emphasized by their character, a point to which we shall come in a moment.
To this end, we will start with an account of where and how they begin to show; for, like the canals, they are not permanent markings, but temporary phenomena. It is in the region about the Solis Lacus that they appear first. The Solis Lacus, or Lake of the Sun, is perhaps the most striking marking on Mars. It is an oval spot in lat. 28° S., with its greater diameter nearly perpendicular to the meridians, and encircled by an elliptical ring of reddish-ochre land, which in turn is bordered on the south by the blue-green regions of the south temperate zone. The whole configuration is such as to simulate a gigantic eye which uncannily turns round upon one as the planet slowly revolves. It is so conspicuous a feature of the disc that it has been recognized for a great many years. The resemblance to an eye is further borne out by a cordon of canals that surround it on the north. Upon this cordon, composed chiefly of the Araxes and the Agathodaemon, are beaded a number of spots, two of them, the Phoenix and the Tithonus lakes, being conspicuously prominent. Closer scrutiny reveals several more of the same sort, only smaller. These are all interconnected by a network of canals. Now just as it is in this region that the canals first show, so likewise is it here that the spots first make their appearance.
Although it was here that at this last opposition the spots were first seen, it was not here that their character and purpose became apparent. It was not until later in the season, when the Eumenides-Orcus began to give evidence of being yet more peculiarly beaded, that the true nature of the spots suggested itself.
The Eumenides-Orcus is a very long and important canal, connecting the Phoenix Lake with the Trivium Charontis. It is so long, 3540 miles from one end of it to the other, that although it starts in lat. 16° N., and ends in lat. 12° S., it belts the disc not many degrees inclined to the equator. For a great distance it runs parallel to the northern coast of the Sea of the Sirens. From this coast several canals strike down to it; some stopping at it, others continuing on down the disc. Especially is the western end of the sea, called the Gulf of the Titans, a point of departure for canals; no less than six of them, and doubtless more, leaving the gulf in variously radiating directions. At the place where these canals severally cross the Eumenides-Orcus, I began in November to see spots. I also saw others along the Pyriphlegethon, an important canal leading in a more northerly direction from the Phoenix Lake; along the Gigas, a great canal running from the Gulf of the Titans all the way to the Lake of the Moon; and along other canals in the same region. I then noticed that the spots to the north of the Solis Lacus region had darkened, since August, relatively to the more southern ones. In short, I became aware both of a great increase in the number of spots, and of an increase in tint in the spots previously seen.
It was apparent that the spots were part and parcel of the canal system, and that in the matter of varying visibility they took after the canals,—chronologically, very closely after them; for a comparison of the two leads me to be-
Furthermore, the spots, like the canals, grow in conspicuousness with time. Now when we consider that nothing, practically, has changed between us and them in the interval; that there has been no symptom of cloud or other obscuration, before or after, over the place where they eventually appear, we are led to the conclusion that, like the canals, they grow.
Indeed, in the history of their development the two features seem quite similar. Both grow, and both follow the same order and method in their growth. Both are affected by one progressive change that sweeps over the face of the planet from the pole to the equator, and then from the equator toward the other pole. In the case of the southern hemisphere, it is, as we have just seen, the most southern spots, like the most southern canals, that appear first after the melting of the polar snows. Then gradually others begin to show farther and farther north. The quickening of the spots, like the quickening of the canals, is a seasonal affair. But there is more in it than this. It takes place in a manner to imply that something more immediate than the change in the seasons is concerned in it; immediate not in time, but in relation to the result. A comparison of the behavior of three spots—the Phoenix Lake, the spot at the junction of the Iris and the Gigas, at the upper extremity of Ceraunius, and a spot where the Steropes, a newly found canal, and the Nilus meet—will serve to point out what this something is. The Phoenix Lake lies in lat. 17° S., the upper Ceraunius in lat 12° N., and the spot on the Steropes in lat. 28° N. In August of last year, the first of these markings was very conspicuous, the second but moderately so, while the third was barely discernible. By November, the Phoenix Lake had become less salient, Ceraunius relatively more so, and the spot on the Steropes nearly as evident as Ceraunius had formerly been. In the Martian calendar, the August observation corresponded to our 20th of June, the November one to our 1st of August, of the southern hemisphere; or to our 20th of December and 1st of February, respectively, of the northern one. All three spots were practically within the equatorial regions. Now, on earth, no such marked progression in seasonal change occurs within the tropics. With us, it is to all intents and purposes equally green there the year through. On Mars it is not. Clearly, some more definite factor than the seasons enters into the matter upon our neighbor world.
That this factor is water seems, from the behavior of the blue-green areas generally, to be pretty certain. But just as the so-called seas are undoubtedly not seas, nor the canals waterways, so the spots are not lakes. Their mode of growth, so far as it may be discerned, confirms this conclusion. Apparently, it is not so much by an increase in size as by a deepening in tint that they gradually become recognizable. They start, it would seem, as big as they are to be, but faint in tone, premonitory shades of their future selves. They then proceed to substantialize by darkening in tint throughout. Now, to deepen thus in color with one consent all over would be a peculiar thing for a lake to do. For had the lake appreciable depth to start with, it should always be visible; and had it not, its bed would have to be phenomenally level to permit of its being all flooded at once. If, however, the spots be not bodies of water, but areas of verdure, their deepening in tint throughout is perfectly explicable, since the darkening would be the natural result of a simultaneous growth of vegetation. This inference is further borne out by the fact that to the spot class belong unquestionably those larger oval markings of which the Lake of the Sun is the most conspicuous
When we put all these phenomena together,—the presence of the spots at the junctions of the canals, their strangely systematic shapes, their seasonal darkening, and last, but not least, the resemblance of the great continental regions of Mars to the deserts of the earth,—a solution of their character suggests itself at once: to wit, that they are oases in the midst of that desert, and not wholly innocent of design; for, in number, position, shape, and behavior, the oases turn out as typical and peculiar a feature of Mars as the canals themselves.
Each phenomenon is highly suggestive considered alone, but each acquires still greater significance from its association with the other; for here in the oases we have an end and object for the existence of canals, and the most natural one in the world, namely, that the canals are constructed for the express purpose of fertilizing the oases. Thus the mysterious rendezvousing of the canals at these special points is at once explicable. The canals rendezvous so entirely in defiance of the doctrine of chances because they were constructed to that end. They are not purely natural developments, but cases of assisted nature, just as they look to be at first sight. This, at least, is the only explanation that fully accounts for the facts. Of course all such evidence of design may be purely fortuitous, with about as much probability, as it has happily been put, as that a chance collection of numbers should take the form of the multiplication table.
In addition to this general dovetailing of detail to one conclusion is to be noticed the strangely economic character of both the canals and the oases in the matter of form. That the lines should follow arcs of great circles, whatever their direction, is as unnatural from a natural standpoint as it would be natural from an artificial one; for the arc of a great circle is the shortest distance from one point upon the surface of a sphere to another. It would, therefore, if topographically possible, be the course to take to conduct water, with the least expenditure of time or trouble, from the one to the other.
The circular shape of the oases is as directly economic as is the straightness of the canals; for the circle is the figure which incloses the maximum area for the minimum average distance from its centre to any point situated within it. In consequence, if a certain amount of country were to be irrigated, intelligence would suggest the circular form in preference to all others, in order thus to cover the greatest space with the least labor. In the case of the double canals, the same labor-saving intent would lead as instantly to a rounded rectangle.
Even more markedly unnatural is another phenomenon of this most phenomenal system, of which almost every one has heard, and which almost nobody has seen,—the double canals.
To see them, however, all that is needed is a sufficiently steady air, a sufficiently attentive observer, and the suitable season of the Martian year. When these conditions are observed, the sight may be seen without difficulty, and is every whit as strange as Schiaparelli, who first saw it, has described it.
So far as the observer is concerned, what occurs is this: Upon a part of the disc where up to that time a single canal has been visible, of a sudden some night, in place of the single canal appear twin canals,—as like, indeed, as twins, if not more so, similar both in character and in inclination, running side by side the
In good air the phenomenon is quite unmistakable. The two lines are as distinct and as distinctly parallel as possible. No draughtsman could draw them better. They are thoroughly Martian in their mathematical precision. At the very first glance, they convey, like all the other details of the canal system, the appearance of artificiality. It may be well to state this here definitely, for the benefit of such as, without having seen the canals, indulge in criticism about them. No one who has seen the canals well—and the well is all-important for bringing out the characteristics that give the stamp of artificiality, the straightness and fineness of the lines—would ever have any doubt as to their seeming artificial, however he might choose to blind himself to the consequences. An element akin to the comic enters criticism based not upon what the critics have seen, but upon what they have not. Books are reviewed without being read, to prevent prejudice; but it is rash to carry the same admirable broad-mindedness into scientific subjects.
In detail the doubles vary, chiefly, it would seem, in the distance the twin lines lie apart. In the widest I have seen, the Ganges, six degrees separate the two; in the narrowest, the Phison, four degrees and a quarter,—not a very great difference between the extremes. Four degrees and a quarter on Mars amount to 156 miles; six degrees, to 220. These, then, are the distances between the centres of the twin canals. Each canal seems a little less than a degree wide, or about 30 miles in the narrower instances; in the broader, a little more than a degree, or about 45 miles. Between the two lines, in the cases where the gemination, as it is called, is complete, lies reddish-ochre ground similar to the rest of the surface of the bright regions. Deducting the two half-widths of the bordering canals, we have, therefore, from 120 to 175 miles of clear country between the paralleling lines.
The gemination of a canal is a phenomenon individual to the particular canal. Each canal differs from its neighbor not only in the distance the lines lie apart, but in the time at which the duplication occurs. The event seems to depend both upon general seasonal laws governing all the duplications, and upon causes intrinsic to the canal itself. Within limits, each canal doubles at its own good time and after its own fashion. For example, although it seems to be a rule that north and south canals double before east and west ones, nevertheless, of two north and south lines, one will double, the other will not, synchronously with a doubling running east and west; the same is true of those running at any other inclination.
Now this shows that the duplication is not an optical illusion at this end of the line; for, by any double refraction here, all the lines running in the same direction over the disc should be similarly affected, which they are not. On the contrary, there will be, say, two cases of doubling in quite different directions co-existent with several single canals.
Nor is there any probability of its being a case of double refraction at the other end of the line,—that is, in the atmosphere of Mars; for in that case it is hard to see why all the lines should not be affected, to say nothing of the fact that, to render such double refraction possible, we must call upon a noumenon to help us out, as we know of no substance capable of the quality upon so huge a scale. Furthermore, what is cogent to the observer, though of no particular weight with his hearers, the phenomenon has no look of double refraction. It looks to be, what it undoubtedly is, a double existence.
Strengthening this conclusion is the mode of development of the doubling. This appears to take place in two ways, although it is possible that the two are but different instances of one and the same process. Of the first kind, during this last opposition, the Ganges was an example.
The Ganges was in an interesting protoplasmic condition during the whole of last summer. About to multiply by fission, it was not at first evident how this would take place. Hints of gemination were visible when I first looked at it in August. It showed then as a very broad but not dark swath of dusky color, of nearly uniform width from one extremity to the other, with sides suggestively even throughout. It is probable that they were then, as afterward, parallel, and that the slight convergence apparent at the bottom was due simply to foreshortening. The swath ran thus N. N. W. all the way from the Gulf of the Dawn to the Lake of the Moon. By moments of better seeing its two sides showed darker than its middle; that is, it was already double in embryo, with a dusky middle-ground between the twin lines.
In October the doubling had sensibly progressed. The double visions were more frequent, and the ground between the twin lines had grown lighter. By November the doubling was unmistakable, and the mid-clarification had become nearly complete. It is to be remarked that the doubling did not involve the Fons Juventae and the canal leading to it, both of which lay well to the right of the Ganges. The space included between the East and West Ganges was very wide, some six degrees. The canals themselves were, so far as could be seen, quite similar, and about a degree, or 37 miles wide. Both started in the Gulf of the Dawn, and ran down to the lower Lake of the Moon, one entering each side of the lake, or oasis. Two thirds of the way down both similarly touched the sides of another oasis, an upper Lacus Lunae. The whole length of each was 1200 miles.
Except for fleeting suspicions of gemination, and for possible doublings like the parallelism of the Styx and the Hades, the next canal to show double was the Nectar, which was so seen by Mr. Douglass on October 4, and under still better seeing, a few minutes later, the doubling was detected by him extending straight across the Solis Lacus. In the Solis Lacus this was evidently a case of mid-clarification. What occurred in the Nectar seems more allied to the second class of manifestations, such as happened later with the Euphrates and the Phison.
Glimpses of a dual state in these canals were caught during the summer and autumn, but it was not till the November presentation of the region that they came unmistakably twinned. On the 18th of that month, just as the twilight was fading away, the air being very still and the definition exceptional, so soon as the sunset tremors subsided, the Euphrates and its neighbor the Phison showed beautifully doubled, exactly like two great railroad tracks with bright ground between, each set extending down the disc for a distance of 1600 miles.
After that evening, whenever the seeing was good enough, they continued to present the same appearance. Now with them no process of midway clarification, such as had taken place in the Ganges, had previously made itself manifest. They had indeed not been very well defined before duplication occurred, but apparently sufficiently so not to hide such broadening had it taken place; for though the twin canals were not as far apart as the two Ganges, they were quite comparably distant, being, instead of six, about four and a quarter degrees from each other. Evidently, the process was, in the case of the Euphrates at least, under way in October, and even earlier, but was not well seen because the twin canals were not yet dark enough.
There seem, I may remark parentheti-
On the 19th of November I suspected duplication in the Typhon, another canal in the same region. It looked to be double, with dusky ground between.
On the 21st I similarly suspected the Jamuna and the Nilokeras. Both looked broad and dusky, with very ill-defined condensation at the sides. But the seeing was not superlative. On the 22d I brought my observations to an end, in consequence of having to return East.
Exactly what takes place, therefore, in this curious process of doubling I cannot pretend to say. It has been suggested that a progressive ripening of vegetation from the centre to the edges might cause a broad swath of green to become seemingly two. There are facts, however, that do not tally with this view. For example, the Ganges was always broad, but fainter, not narrower, earlier in the season. The Phison, on the other hand, went through no such process. Indeed, we are here very much in the dark, certainly very far off from what does take place in Martian canal gemination. Perhaps we may learn considerably more about it at the next opposition. At this the tendril end of our knowledge of our neighbor we cannot expect hard wood.
To return now from these outposts of investigation to our main subject matter. We have seen what shows at one end of the canals, their inner end, namely, the oases. But it seems that there is also something exceptional at the other. At the mouth of each canal, at the edge of the so-called seas, appears a curious dark spot of the form of a half-filled angle; the sort of a mark with which one checks items on a list. Its form is singularly appropriate, according to mundane ideas, for it appears before the canal itself is visible, as if to mark the spot where the canal will eventually be. It lies in the so-called seas, and looks to be of the same color as they, but deeper in tint.
All the canals that debouch into the dark regions are provided with these terminal triangles, except those that lead out of long estuaries, like the Nilosyrtis, the Hiddekel, the Gehon, and so forth. The double canals are provided with twin triangles. That the triangular patches are phenomena connected with the canals is evident from the fact that they never appear elsewhere. What exact purpose they serve is not so clear, but it would seem to be that of reservoirs or relay stations for the water before it enters the canals; what we see, upon this supposition, being not the station or reservoir itself, but the specially fertile area round it.
That, in addition to being in a way oases themselves, they serve some such purpose as the above is further hinted at by two facts: first, that whereas the oases develop, apparently, after the canals leading to them, the triangular spots develop before the canals that lead out of them; second, Mr. Douglass finds that it is in them that the canals in the dark regions terminate. They are the end of the one system at the same time that they are the beginning of the other. They would, therefore, seem to be waystations of some sort on the road taken by the water from the polar cap to the equator.
Paralleling in appearance the oases in the bright regions are round spots that occur at the junctions of the canals in the dark ones. Speaking figuratively, these are the heads of the nails in the coffin of the idea that the seas are seas; since, if the blue-green color came from water, there could not be permanent darker dots upon it connected by equally dark streaks. Speaking unfiguratively, this shows that the whole system of canals and specially fertilized spots is not confined to the deserts, but extends in a
One of these specially fertile spots, situated upon the borderland betwixt the dark and the light regions, has a picturesque history. It lies at the head of the Margaritifer Sinus, or Pearl-Bearing Gulf, so named some years ago by Schiaparelli; the name having been given by him to the gulf quite fortuitously. But it turns out that the gulf was prophetically named, for there in it is this round spot which makes terminus to a short canal connecting it with the lower end of the western Sabaeus Sinus, and probably also terminus to a long canal coming from the Chrysorrhoas, across both branches of the Ganges. Diving into the depths of space has thus brought up the pearl from the bottom of the gulf.
We thus perceive that the blue-green areas are subjected to the same engineering system as the bright ones. In short, no part of the planet is allowed to escape from the all-pervasive trigonometric spirit. If this be Nature's doing, she certainly runs her mathematics into the ground.
To review, now, the chain of reasoning by which we have been led to regard it probable that upon the surface of Mars we see the effects of local intelligence: we find, in the first place, that the broad physical conditions of the planet are not antagonistic to some form of life; secondly, that there is an apparent dearth of water upon the planet's surface, and therefore, if beings of sufficient intelligence inhabited it, they would have to resort to irrigation to support life; thirdly, that there turns out to be a network of markings covering the disc precisely counterparting what a system of irrigation would look like; and, lastly, that there is a set of spots placed where we should expect to find the lands thus artificially fertilized, and behaving as such constructed oases should. All this, of course, may be a set of coincidences, signifying nothing; but the probability seems the other way. As to details of explanation, any we may adopt will undoubtedly be found, on closer acquaintance, to vary from the actual Martian state of things; for any Martian life must differ markedly from our own.
The fundamental fact in the matter is the dearth of water. If we keep this in mind, we shall see that many of the objections that spontaneously arise answer themselves. The supposed Herculean task of constructing such canals disappears at once; for if the canals be dug for irrigation purposes, it is evident that what we see and call, by ellipsis, the canal is not really the canal at all, but the strip of fertilized land bordering it,—the thread of water in the midst of it, the canal itself, being far too small to be perceptible. In the case of an irrigation canal seen at a distance, it is always the strip of verdure, not the canal, that is visible, as we see in looking from afar upon irrigated country on the earth.
Startling as the outcome of these observations may appear at first, in truth there is nothing startling about it whatever. Such possibility has been quite on the cards ever since the existence of Mars itself was recognized by the Chaldean shepherds, or whoever the still more primeval astronomers may have been. Its strangeness is a purely subjective phenomenon, arising from the instinctive reluctance of man to admit the possibility of peers. Such would be comic were it not the inevitable consequence of the constitution of the universe. To be shy of anything resembling himself is part and parcel of man's own individuality. Like the savage who fears nothing so much as a strange man, like Crusoe who grows pale at the sight of footprints not his own, the civilized thinker instinctively turns from the thought of mind other than the one he himself knows. To admit into his conception of the cosmos other finite minds as factors has in it something of the weird. Any hypothesis to explain the
We must be just as careful not to run to the other extreme, and draw deductions of purely local outgrowth. To talk of Martian beings is not to mean Martian men. Just as the probabilities point to the one, so do they point away from the other. Even on this earth man is of the nature of an accident. He is the survival of by no means the highest physical organism. He is not even a high form of mammal. Mind has been his making. For aught we can see, some lizard or batrachian might just as well have popped into his place in the race, and been now the dominant creature of this earth. Under different physical circumstances he would have been certain to do so. Amid the physical surroundings that exist on Mars, we may be practically sure other organisms have been evolved which would strike us as exquisitely grotesque. What manner of beings they may be we have no data to conceive.
How diverse, however, they doubtless are from us will appear from such definite deduction as we are able to make from the physical differences between Mars and our earth. For example, the mere difference of gravity on the surface of the two planets is much more far-reaching in its effects than might at first be thought. Gravity on the surface of Mars is only a little more than one third what it is on the surface of the earth. This would work in two ways to very different conditions of existence from those to which we are accustomed. To begin with, three times as much work, as for example in digging a canal, could be done by the same expenditure of muscular force. If we were transported to Mars, we should be pleasingly surprised to find all our manual labor suddenly lightened threefold. But, indirectly, there might result a yet greater gain to our capabilities; for if Nature chose, she could afford there to build her inhabitants on three times the scale she does on earth, without their ever finding it out except by interplanetary comparison.
As we all know, a very large man is much more unwieldy than a very small one. An elephant refuses to hop like a flea; not because he considers it undignified to do so, but simply because he cannot take the step. If we could, we should all jump straight across the street, instead of painfully paddling through the mud. Our inability to do so depends partly on the size of the earth, and partly on the size of our own bodies, but not at all on what it at first seems entirely to depend on, the size of the street.
To see this, let us consider the very simplest case, that of standing erect. To this every-day feat opposes itself the weight of the body simply, a thing of three dimensions, height, breadth, and thickness, while the ability to accomplish it resides in the cross-section of the muscles of the knee, a thing of only two dimensions, breadth and thickness. Consequently, a person half as large again as another has about twice the supporting capacity of that other, but about three times as much to support. Standing
Now apply this principle to a possible inhabitant of Mars, and suppose him to be constructed three times as large as a human being in every dimension. If he were on earth, he would weigh twenty-seven times as much as the human being, but on the surface of Mars, since gravity there is only about one third of what it is here, he would weigh but nine times as much. The cross-section of his muscles would be nine times as great. Therefore the ratio of his supporting power to the weight he must support would be the same as ours. Consequently, he would be able to stand with no more fatigue than we experience. Now consider the work he might be able to do. His muscles, having length, breadth, and thickness, would all be twenty-seven times as effective as ours. He would prove twenty-seven times as strong as we, and could accomplish twenty-seven times as much. But he would further work upon what required, owing to decreased gravity, but one third the effort to overcome. His effective force, therefore, would be eighty-one times as great as man's, whether in digging canals or in other bodily occupation. As gravity on the surface of Mars is really a little more than one third that at the surface of the earth, the true ratio is not eighty-one, but about fifty; that is, a Martian would be, physically, fifty-fold more efficient than a man.
As the reader will observe, there is nothing problematical about this deduction whatever. It expresses an abstract ratio of physical capabilities which must exist between the two planets, quite irrespective of whether there be denizens on either, or how other conditions may further affect their forms.
Something more we may deduce about the characteristics of possible Martians, dependent upon Mars itself, a result of the age of the world they would live in.
A planet may in a very real sense be said to have a life of its own, of which what we call life may or may not be a detail. It is born, has its fiery youth, its sober middle age, its palsied senility, and ends at last in cold incapability of further change, its death. The speed with which it runs through its gamut of change depends upon its size; for the larger the body, the longer it takes to cool, and with it loss of heat means loss of life. It takes longer to cool because, as we saw in a previous paper, it has relatively more inside than outside, and it is through its outside that its inside cools. Now, inasmuch as time and space are not, as some philosophers have from their too mundane standpoint supposed, forms of our intellect, but essential attributes of the universe, the time taken by any process affects the character of the process itself, as does also the size of the body undergoing it. The changes brought about in a large planet by its cooling are not, therefore, the same as those brought about in a small one. Physically, chemically, and, to our present end, organically, the two results are quite diverse. So different, indeed, are they that unless the planet have at least a certain size it will never produce what we call life, meaning our particular chain of changes or closely allied forms of it, at all. As we saw in the case of atmosphere, it will lack even the premise to such conclusion.
Whatever the particular planet's line of development, however, in its own line it proceeds to greater and greater degrees of evolution, till the process is arrested by the planet's death, as above
Now, in the special case of Mars, we have before us the spectacle of an old world, a world well on in years, a world much older relatively than the earth, halfway between it and the end we see so sadly typified by our moon, a body now practically past possibility of change. To so much about his age Mars bears evidence on his face. He shows unmistakable signs of being old. What we know would follow advancing planetary years is legible there. His continents are all smoothed down; his oceans have all dried up. If he ever had a jeunesse orageuse, it has long since been forgotten. Although called after the turbulent of the gods, he is, and probably always has been, one of the most peaceful of the heavenly bodies. His name is a sad misnomer; indeed, the ancients seem to have been singularly unfortunate in their choice of planetary cognomens. With Mars so peaceful, Jupiter so young, and Venus bashfully dropped in cloud, the planets' names accord but ill with their temperaments.
Mars being thus old himself, we know that evolution on his surface must be similarly advanced. This only informs us of its condition relative to the planet's capabilities. Of its actual state our data are not definite enough to furnish much deduction. But from the fact that our own development has been comparatively a recent thing, and that a long time would be needed to bring even Mars to his present geological condition, we may judge any life he may support to be not only relatively, but really, more advanced than our own.
From the little we can see, such appears to be the case. The evidence of handicraft, if such it be, points to a highly intelligent mind behind it. Irrigation, unscientifically conducted, would not give us such truly wonderful mathematical fitness in the several parts to the whole as we there behold. A mind of no mean order would seem to have presided over the system we see,—a mind certainly of considerably more comprehensiveness than that which presides over the various departments of our own public works. Party politics, at all events, have had no part in them; for the system is planet wide. Quite possibly, such Martian folk are possessed of inventions of which we have not dreamed, and with them electrophones and kinetoscopes are things of a bygone past, preserved with veneration in museums as relics of the clumsy contrivances of the simple childhood of their kind. Certainly, what we see hints at the existence of beings who are in advance of, not behind us, in the race of life.
For answers to such problems we must look to the future. That Mars seems to be inhabited is not the last, but the first word on the subject. More important than the mere fact of the existence of living beings there is the question of what they may be like. Whether we ourselves shall live to learn this cannot, of course, be foretold. One thing, however, we can do, and that speedily: look at things from a standpoint raised above our local point of view; free our minds at least from the shackles that of necessity tether our bodies; recognize the possibility of others in the same light that we do the certainty of ourselves. That we are the sum and substance of the capabilities of the cosmos is something so preposterous as to be exquisitely comic. We pride ourselves upon being men of the world, forgetting that this is but objectionable singularity, unless we are in some wise men of more worlds than one. For after all, we are but a link in a chain. Man is merely this earth's highest production up to date. That he in any sense gauges the possibilities of the universe is humorous. He does not, as we can easily foresee, even gauge those
If astronomy teaches anything, it teaches that man is but a detail in the evolution of the universe, and that resemblant though diverse details are inevitably to be expected in the host of orbs around him. He learns that though he will probably never find his double anywhere, he is destined to discover any number of cousins scattered through space.
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