That these phenomena
actually existed and were not illusions was proved by later
observations, and today they are seen whenever Mars is favorably
situated for observation.
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.
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