But it was not before 1877
that a fundamentally new discovery in areography gave a truly
sensational turn to speculation about life on ``the red planet.'' In
that year Mars made one of its nearest approaches to the earth, and
was so situated in its orbit that it could be observed to great
advantage from the northern hemisphere of the earth. The celebrated
Italian astronomer, Schiaparelli, took advantage of this opportunity
to make a trigonometrical survey of the surface of Mars -- as coolly
and confidently as if he were not taking his sights across a
thirty-five-million-mile gulf of empty space -- and in the course of
this survey he was astonished to perceive that the reddish areas, then
called continents, were crossed in many directions by narrow, dusky
lines, to which he gave the suggestive name of ``canals.'' Thus a kind
of firebrand was cast into the field of astronomical speculation,
which has ever since produced disputes that have sometimes approached
the violence of political faction. At first the accuracy of
Schiaparelli's observations was contested; it required a powerful
telescope, and the most excellent ``seeing,'' to render the
enigmatical lines visible at all, and many searchers were unable to
detect them. But Schiaparelli continued his studies in the serene sky
of Italy, and produced charts of the gridironed face of Mars
containing so much astonishing detail that one had either to reject
them in toto or to confess that Schiaparelli was right.
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