THE "EDINBURGH REVIEW" ON MARS.
ONE American millionaire at least has found a worthy method of employing his surplus wealth. Mr. Percival Lowell, an astronomer with dollars, has, according to the Edinburgh Review, devoted them to an investigation into the conditions of life in other worlds, "including last, but not least, their habitability by beings like and unlike man." He has built a fine observatory near the town of Flagstaff, in Arizona, 7,300 ft. above the sea, whither he has carried, among other instruments, " an 18 in. equatorial by Brashear," and there for eleven months, from May 24th, 1894, to April 3rd, 1895, he or his assistants have steadily devoted themselves to observations of Mars, achieving as a first result " a marked advance in Martian topography, Mr. Lowell's map of Mars, collected from observations at Flagstaff, being," writes the Reviewer, who is obviously an expert, "a remarkable produc- tion " :—" Turning the globe completely round, as it were, before his audience, he describes, with the help of a set of beautiful drawings, the successive presentations of its chief features, and so impressively as to bring Mars—at least in the cartographical sense—within the familiar acquaintance of all who lend him their attention." That seems to us, as we have said, a worthy employment of wealth and leisure, for apart altogether from the object sought, which to many minds, and especially to the minds of a majority of astronomers, will appear somewhat fanciful, it is through investigations pursued under such restrictions that we may hope to obtain a real advance in the manufacture of telescopic apparatus. Men who are searching for a definite something feel the defects of their apparatus as no other observers can, and an American of science with resources practically limitless if he feels defects in his apparatus is nearly certain to make experiments which will either produce results, or show us conclusively that results are not to be obtained by human ingenuity. It is difficult to believe, when we remember what has been done in other fields of observation, that telescopes have yet been perfected, or to doubt that there are methods, to be discovered by endless perseverance and expenditure, of either increasing farther the range of human eyes, or of superseding them by photographic " eyes " of far superior delicacy and power of vision. The suggestion which the agents of Mr. Yerkes, the Tramway King, are said to be endeavouring to work out, of constructing object-glasses of unprecedented magnitude in pieces, opens a long vista of possibilities, while there is no proof that we are finally con- fined to glass, a heavy material full of flaws, for the necessary crystals. A lifetime and, say, five millions would not be wasted if their devotion resulted in a great improvement in telescopes such as would confer on all future observers of the heavens powers as new as those which the earlier astronomers derived from the invention of the telescope itself. And one can discern no final reason why such an improvement is impossible,—certainly no reason so con-
vincing as those which only two years ago would have induced even sanguine men to declare that the hope of seeing through a wooden box or into the human frame was not only unreasonable but positively silly. Those were not unintelli- gent persona who only last year received the first telegrams announcing Dr. Rontgen's discovery with a stare of amused surprise at the popular ignorance of the limits of investi- gation, and who believed, as we know many believed, that Professor Rontgen's name had been taken in vain, and that some clever rascal was availing himself for his own amuse- ment of the disposition towards credulity which recent dis- coveries in science have undoubtedly generated in educated mankind. Nobody now would receive a telegram announcing that Mr. Edison had discovered the law for the transmutation of metals, or a plan for conveying whispers under the Atlantic, with absolute disbelief. Indeed, nobody does disbelieve that a Hungarian Professor has discovered, or thinks he has dis- covered, a way to secure the last-named result, and is about to test it at Valentia.
Nor can we perceive, in spite of all the ridicule to which it has been subjected, that the declared object of Mr. Lowell's investigations, and, we may add, of many investigations more privately carried on, is in any way unworthy of the devotion of years and millions. The discovery of the Philosopher's Stone, supposing that phrase to imply a working scheme for transmuting an inferior metal into gold, would pro- bably produce nothing beyond a period of terrible economic confusion, or perhaps a vast and disastrous, because over-rapid, transfer of property; but the attainment of certainty that sentient beings with corporeal encasements, acting by effort and not by pure volition, existed in any one other planet, would only enlarge the range of human thought and the force of the human imagination. Such a certainty would either increase to an extraordinary degree the reverence for the Creator—for we are all so limited that we reverence powers which we see exerted more than powers which we know in theory must exist—or would compel materialists to revise and widen their whole theory of the relation of matter to mind, it being evident that sentience could exist under conditions hitherto deemed impossible. There are certainly millions, and possibly billions, of worlds of which no two are the same, and if sentient beings were found past question in one other world than ours, the presumption that they existed under a variety of conditions, and probably, therefore, in a variety of forma practically unlimited, would become so violent that to reject the theory would soon be regarded as an evidence of a foolish popular habit of disbelief in the unseen. Man has some internal dislike to believe that limited beings with sen- tience can exist under conditions other than his own, and habitually assumes—as, for instance, is assumed in this very Review—that a world without air is a dead world, or at all events an empty world ; yet there is no proof that the ether, which we know to be everywhere, cannot support life, or that circumstances of which we know nothing may not modify either its intolerable cold or the effect of that cold. In Mars itself there is some potency at work which, to the despair for the moment of terrestrial science, produces warmth where cold ought to reign permanently supreme- It is as certain as any deduction from analogy can be that air in Mars, though it exists, is as rarefied as it would be at the top of a mountain twice as high as Mount Everest, and that conse- quently the normal and permanent degree of cold ought to be terrible. " The thermal income of Mars is less than half that of the earth, and its theoretical mean temperature is consequently—taking into account its low albedo,' or re- flective power per unit of area—thirty degrees Centigrade below freezing." Yet the actual climate of Mars is mild, snow certainly melts rapidly—that is patent to the telescope —vapour certainly rises—that is clear from the spectrum- analysis—water flows, and there are indications, if not proofs, that a sudden vegetation follows the sudden thawing of the snow. What warms the air is unknown, but it is warmed past all question or doubt, and all arguments, therefore, as to the inevitableness of cold in other worlds must be pronounced imperfect, as also are those which show the impossibility of sustaining corporeal life. All we can say with certainty is that if sentient beings with corporeal frames exist in Mars, the relation of the lungs to the body cannot be identical with their relation in man, which, as we are aware of fishes, is not an impossible exercise of the imagination. If conditions
fatal to human life on this little globe are compatible in any one other world with corporeal life, no conditions can be finally declared to be hopelessly inconsistent with it, the only certainty in the event of such a discovery being that our "necessary" or " inevitable " conditions are not universally either inevitable or necessary. In fact, whatever the direction taken after such a discovery by human thought, it must neces- sarily be widened—not widened as it might be by a new revela- tion, but widened—and to attain that end a generation of millionaires or a mountain of gold might worthily and right- fully be expended. What are they worth compared with a great expansion of the human intellect ?
It remains to state, though it is hardly needful, that as yet inquiry is in its embryonic stage, and may of course encounter natural barriers which will for ever prove im- passable. All that we actually know hitherto may be summed up in a very few lines. One planet, Mars, is habitable by corporeal beings but slightly differing from ourselves. There is warmth, there is water, there are seasons in a sequence like those of earth, there is a strong probability, though not yet a certainty, of recurrent vegetation—indicated to the observer by otherwise inexplicable changes of colour— and there is some reason to believe in the existence of great public works intended to store and distribute the otherwise insufficient supply of water. The proof of this latter hypo- thesis, though it convinced Professor Schiaparelli, is as yet wholly insufficient, resting as it does on the assumption that Nature never makes perfectly straight lines ; but it is suffi- cient to justify years of patient observation, and the expendi- ture if needful of millions, in the effort to increase our telescopic powers. The Reviewer says :—" A new epoch in the investigation of Mars was opened by Signor Schiaparelli's discovery of the 'canals' of Mars during the memorable opposition of 1877. He may be called a miraculous observer. Everything, so far, seen by him with conviction has had only to wait for full ratification. The views of Mars afforded him by an 81 in., later by an 18 in. refractor were of unprecedented perfection. They had the exquisite clearness of a line- engraving, and left no room for illusion ; the features they included were unmistakably there. His canals have thus gradually triumphed over the incredulity, as to their objective presence, of those whose eyes or whose in- struments were incapable of showing them, and have taken rank among the least questionable, although perhaps the very strangest of planetary phenomena." We en- tirely acknowledge that the artificiality of these lines is at best a grand guess, and that the dreamy stuff written two years ago about the possibility of interstellar communication is most of it pure nonsense; but our contention remains solid, that observation of Mars, if carried on for years and with improved instruments, tay produce results so enlightening that the chance of attaining them is well worth the devotion of millions of treasure and the lives of many thoughtful men.
Previous page
