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The Planet Mars:
http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/onlinebks/mars/chap07.htm
A History of Observation and Discovery
William Sheehan
Chapter 7
Lowell
The next opposition of Mars after 1892 occurred on October 20, 1894. At
41 million miles (65 million km), Mars was slightly farther away from the
Earth than it had been in 1892. But the greater distance was more than offset
by the red planet's greater altitude in northern skies. Indeed, this proved
to be one of the most memorable oppositions in the history of Martian exploration---not
least because of the emergence on the scene of Percival Lowell, of whom one
of his biographers rightly said that "of all the men through history who
have posed questions and proposed answers about Mars, [he was] the most influential
and by all odds the most controversial."1 Ideas about Martian life had been
floated by Schiaparelli, Flammarion, and others, but it was left to Lowell
to fashion them into a coherent whole.
Percival Lowell was born in Boston on March 13, 1855, the eldest son of
Augustus and Katharine Bigelow Lowell (fig. 12). There was blue blood on
both sides of the family. An ancestor, Percival Lowle, had come to what later
became known as Newbury, Massachusetts, in 1639. A Bristol merchant, Lowle
had followed John Winthrop, the "Lodestone of America," to the Massachusetts
Bay Colony at the advanced age of sixty-seven---an undertaking that attests
to the almost manic energy that characterized many of his descendants as
well.
In addition to their energy, the Lowells tended to exhibit talents for
mathematics and literature. Percival Lowell had both in unusual degree, as
well as a personal magnetism that many who knew him remarked. Thus journalist
Ferris Greenslet wrote: "This reporter has met many of the so-called great
men of his time, but none with a more potent personal quality than Percival
Lowell. He agrees with another witness that one felt it before, or almost
before, he entered the room. It was as if one had been suddenly deposited
in a powerful magnetic field."2
The early Lowells, although prominent in Massachusetts affairs, were not
remarkably wealthy. This changed in 1813 when Francis Cabot Lowell, Percival's
great-great-uncle, decided to build a cotton mill at Waltham, Massachusetts,
with spinning machinery and a practical power loom modeled on those he had
recently seen in the Lancashire textile mills of England. "I well recollect,"
said Nathan Appleton, a leading stockholder, "the state of admiration and
satisfaction with which we sat by the hour watching the beautiful movement
of the new and wonderful machine, destined as it evidently was to change
the character of all textile industry."3 In the office of the textile business
of his paternal grandfather, John Amory Lowell, Percival Lowell would later
work and amass his own fortune. On the other side of the family, his maternal
grandfather was Abbott Lawrence, onetime minister to the Court of St. James's.
Indeed, the Lawrences were as well-off as the Lowells, with their own textile
fortunes. Both families had Massachusetts cities named for them.
Lowell was educated at various private schools in the United States and
abroad, and by the age of ten was fluent in French. At eleven he composed
a hundred lines of Latin hexameters on the loss of a toy boat. At about
this time his father, Augustus, settled the family in the mansion he called
Sevenels (so named because there were seven Lowells living there), at 70
Heath Street in Brookline, Massachusetts. Percival no doubt enjoyed rambling
about the family estate, which was later affectionately described by his
younger sister, Amy, the iconoclast cigar-smoking poet:
Sevenels made a corner where two roads join. . . .
I remember them as unfrequented country roads. The place is surrounded by
a wall of uncemented pudding-stone over which predatory boys have made it
impossible to grow vines. There is an entrance on each road flanked by heavy
stone posts, and just inside the wall runs a wide belt of trees, mostly
elms, but with just enough evergreens to keep the whole inviolate from the
eyes of passers-by.
Within this belt of trees runs a wide meadow, kept from mowing, in June
a glory of daisies and buttercups nodding in the wind, a paradise to a child,
as I well remember. . . . Beyond the meadow begins the grove. A little handful
of land so cunningly cut by paths and with the trees so artfully disposed
that one can wander happily among them and almost believe that one is walking
in a real wood.
The house itself stands in the midst of lawns and grass terraces. The
South Lawn, fringed by trees and bordered with hybrid rhododendrons and
azaleas, drops sheerly down to a path, at one end of which is an old fashioned
arbour covered with wisteria and trumpet-vines, and two flights of stone
steps lead into a formal sunken garden.4
It was in the cupola of the roof at Sevenels that fifteen-year-old Percival
Lowell set up his first telescope---a 2.25-inch (6-cm) refractor.
Later, at Harvard, Lowell excelled in English composition and mathematics
and won the Bowdoin Prize for his essay "The Rank of England as a European
Power from the Death of Elizabeth to the Death of Anne." He graduated with
honors in 1876, giving, as his part in the commencement exercises, a talk
on the nebular hypothesis of Laplace (drawn very heavily from the English
philosopher Herbert Spencer). His cousin, the poet James Russell Lowell,
referred to Percival as "the most brilliant man in Boston";5 and one of his
professors, the distinguished mathematician Benjamin Peirce, invited him to
stay on at Harvard to teach mathematics. Lowell declined---"because I preferred
not to tie myself down," he later recalled, "not because mathematics had
not appealed to me as the thing most worthy of thought in the world."6 Instead,
with his cousin and freshman roommate, Harcourt Amory, he opted for a Grand
Tour of Europe as far as Syria, and though he had so recently refused to
tie himself down to "the thing most worthy of thought in the world," he almost
managed to get himself enlisted for the front in the war between Serbia and
Turkey.
On returning to the United States in 1877, the year of Schiaparelli's
fateful discovery of the Martian canals, still having no impulse to a profession,
Lowell went to work in his grandfather's textile business, where he remained
for six years, learning the ways of business, for a time acting as treasurer---that
is, as the executive head of a cotton mill---and managing trusts and electric
companies. In 1883 he left the family business and set sail for the Far East,
the first of three such voyages he would make over the next decade. The
circumstances surrounding what must have seemed a sudden decision were in
some ways similar to those that later led him to turn to Mars. Inspired by
the 1882 lecture series on Japanese culture given by zoologist Edward Sylvester
Morse at the Lowell Institute (founded by Percival's great-uncle, John Lowell,
and run by his father, Augustus Lowell), he was seized by a sudden enthusiasm
to join Morse's crusade to preserve traditional Japanese culture in the face
of rapid modernization.7 In Tokyo, he rented a house, hired Japanese servants,
and began to learn the language.
When he was approached to accompany a special trade mission from Korea
to the United States, he hesitated, "mainly due," as his brother Abbott Lawrence
Lowell later put it, "to anxiety to what his father would say."8 However,
he received encouragement from another cousin, William Sturgis Bigelow,
a Boston physician who shared his enthusiasm for the Orient. Bigelow wrote
to Augustus Lowell that although Percival "distrusts himself too much, he
has great ability, he has learned Japanese faster than I ever saw any man
learn a language---and he only needs to be assured that he is doing the right
thing to make a success of anything he undertakes, whether science or diplomacy."9
(In fact, Lowell's accomplishments as a linguist were somewhat exaggerated,
for apparently he never did succeed in achieving either fluency or literacy
in Japanese.)10 Nevertheless, the young Lowell overcame any opposition on
his father's part and any doubts of his own abilities that he might have
harbored, for, as Ferris Greenslet remarked, "this was the last occasion
in which there is any record of such distrust."11
After the Korean mission completed its aim of establishing trade relations
with the United States, Lowell returned to Seoul with the Korean delegation,
and, as a diplomatic official, was given a house forming part of the Foreign
Office. The situation in Seoul must have been quite appealing to someone
with Lowell's poetic temperament, as his description of his house there indicates:
"From the street you enter a courtyard, then another, then a garden, and
so on, wall after wall, until you have left the outside world far behind and
are in a labyrinth of your own."12
Lowell remained in the Far East for ten years, returning home only to
see his books through the publication process: Chosön: The Land of
the Morning Calm in 1886, The Soul of the Far East in 1888, and Noto in
1891.13
Despite his strong attraction to Japanese art and gardens, his romantic
impulse for the Far East was soon tempered by his irritation at the inefficiency
and irrationality of premodern people. His 1891 trip to the peninsula of
Noto, for example, concluded with the following reflection: "From below, by
the river's mouth, the roar of the surf came forebodingly up out of the ashen
east; but in the west was still a glory, and as I turned to it I seemed to
look down the long vista of the journey to western Noto by the sea. I thought
how I had pictured it to myself before starting, and then how little the
facts had fitted the fancy."14
In the last of his Far Eastern books, Occult Japan (1895), Lowell took
up the subject of Shinto trances, which he had first witnessed on the summit
of Mount Ontaké, and described the séances he had held in his
own house ("red flame and potent spells in a dark dark room," he described
them to his friend Frederic Jepson Stimson). His experiments included rather
cold-blooded attempts to test the sensibility of the trance subjects by sticking
pins in them. The journalist Lafcadio Hearn, who had greatly admired Lowell's
earlier work and who spent most of his own adult life in Japan, characterized
Occult Japan as "painfully unsympathetic, Mephistophilean in a way that
chills me."15
As Lowell's infatuation with the Far East began to wane, his boyhood interest
in astronomy came once more to the foreground. It was premonitory of the
change in direction his career was about to take that on his last voyage to
Japan, in late 1892, he carried with him a 6-inch (15-cm) Clark refractor,
which he used to observe Saturn from his Tokyo residence---Mars being neglected
only because it was already past opposition by that time.
Indeed, as early as 1890 he had begun to correspond about Mars with William
H. Pickering. After the 1892 opposition, Pickering was dismissed from his
post at Arequipa by his older brother, Edward C. Pickering, the director
of the Harvard College Observatory, who disapproved of his brother's rather
sensationalistic results about Mars (William had been sent to Arequipa primarily
to obtain stellar spectra, not to observe planets) and his inability to stay
within his budget. On returning to Boston, William tried to interest Edward
in sending a Harvard expedition to the Arizona Territory, where he expected
to find excellent seeing, in order to observe the coming opposition of Mars
in October 1894. When that effort failed, he immediately began casting around
for other funding sources. He had not yet succeeded in lining up any firm
support when, in January 1894, he heard from Percival Lowell.
Lowell's decision to take up astronomy in earnest, though it had been
long in developing, apparently came rather suddenly. As late as October
1893, as he was preparing to leave Tokyo for the last time, he wrote to artist
Ralph Curtis that he was considering an Easter jaunt to Seville in the spring
of 1894. He returned to Boston in December 1893 and received Camille Flammarion's
La Planète Mars as a Christmas gift from his aunt, Mary Putnam, read
it at lightning speed, and scrawled "Hurry" across the page.16 The Lowell
family motto was Occasionem cognosce---"Seize your opportunity." Lowell realized
that the scientific investigation of Mars presented such an opportunity,
but the last really favorable opposition of the century was fast approaching.
He would indeed need to hurry if he was to take advantage of it.
In the throes of his new enthusiasm, Lowell arranged to meet Pickering
on or about January 17, 1894. The intermediary for the meeting was probably
Lowell's cousin Abbott Lawrence Rotch, an amateur meteorologist who in 1885
had founded the Blue Hill Meteorological Observatory outside Boston and had
just returned with Pickering from Peru, where he had set up a meteorological
station at Arequipa. Within a week of the meeting, Lowell and Pickering had
come to terms on an expedition of the Harvard Observatory to Arizona for the
purpose of observing Mars. At first, both of the Pickering brothers seem to
have assumed that Lowell intended to act primarily in the role of patron,
but Lowell soon made it clear that he had no interest in merely "going along";
he fully intended to keep control of the expedition himself. The agreement
with Harvard was somewhat acrimoniously dissolved, and Lowell worked out
a different arrangement whereby William Pickering and Andrew Ellicott Douglass,
a young graduate of Connecticut's Trinity College who had been Pickering's
assistant at Arequipa, would be granted one-year leaves of absence from Harvard
so that they could accompany him to Arizona, in return for which Lowell
would personally pay their salaries.17 Seth Carlo Chandler, Jr., wrote to
E. S. Holden at the Lick Observatory that Edward Pickering had attempted
to capture the new observatory for Harvard, "but found he had caught a Tartar
in Lowell who is one who can see through a millstone and not one it is safe
to play as a sucker."18 Henceforth the observatory would be known eponymously
as the Lowell Observatory.
With Lowell having established firm control, the expedition to Arizona
now moved ahead. For telescopes, they would borrow a 12-inch (30-cm) refractor
from Harvard and take along an 18-inch (46-cm) refractor recently finished
by optician John Brashear in Pittsburgh. Pickering drew up designs for a
lightweight dome to be made of canvas and wood. Meanwhile, the location of
the observatory---in many ways the crucial factor---had yet to be chosen.
Douglass was sent west in early March to scout out sites, taking along the
6-inch refractor Lowell had used in Japan. With this instrument he planned
to test the seeing, using a ten-point scale developed by Pickering at Arequipa
that was based on the appearance of a bright star's diffraction disk and rings.19
Douglass arrived in Tombstone by March 8 and tested the seeing there, then
went on to Tucson, Tempe, and Phoenix in southern Arizona before veering north
to Prescott and Ash Fork. Finally he came to Flagstaff, on the main Santa
Fe Railroad line to California. The altitude at this site (7,000 ft, or 2,100
m) on the Coconino Plateau appealed to Lowell, who wrote Douglass that "other
things being equal, the higher we can get the better."20 Douglass found the
results good in the few observations he made in the "opening in the woods"
on the mesa just west of town, but only marginally better than those he had
obtained elsewhere in Arizona. Though Douglass wanted to carry out additional
tests, time was running out. Thus Lowell, on April 16, decided to build the
observatory in Flagstaff.
What Percival Lowell hoped to accomplish through this "speculative, highly
sensational and idiosyncratic project" is well documented in an address he
gave to the Boston Scientific Society on May 22, 1894, which was printed
in the Boston Commonwealth.21 His main object, he stated, was to study the
solar system: "This may be put popularly as an investigation into the condition
of life on other worlds, including last but not least their habitability
by beings like [or] unlike man. This is not the chimerical search some may
suppose. On the contrary, there is strong reason to believe that we are on
the eve of pretty definite discovery in the matter." To Lowell, the implications
of Schiaparelli's network of canali were self-evident:
Speculation has been singularly fruitful as to what
these markings on our next to nearest neighbor in space may mean. Each astronomer
holds a different pet theory on the subject, and pooh-poohs those of all
the others. Nevertheless, the most self-evident explanation from the markings
themselves is probably the true one; namely, that in them we are looking
upon the result of the work of some sort of intelligent beings. . . . [T]he
amazing blue network on Mars hints that one planet besides our own is actually
inhabited now.
With this lecture Lowell had "taken the popular side of the most popular
scientific question about," as W. W. Campbell would later declare,22 and
had---in rather unscientific fashion---announced his conclusions before he
had even put eye to eyepiece.
Lowell documented his arrival at Flagstaff, on May 28, 1894, in a letter
to his mother, to whom he wrote nearly every day: "Here on the day. Telescope
ready for its Arizonian virgin view. . . . Today has been cloudy but now
shows signs of a beautiful night and so, not to bed, but to post and then
to gaze."23 The two telescopes, the 18-inch Brashear and the 12-inch refractor
borrowed from Harvard, were mounted together inside the dome designed by Pickering
(which still lacked its canvas cover). The astronomers---Lowell, Pickering,
and Douglass---had taken temporary accommodations in a hotel in town, but
Lowell and Pickering set up camp in the dome that night to be ready for "early
rising Mars." However, they were clouded out, and rain fell through the open
dome. Finally, on May 31, the sky cooperated, and they used the 12-inch refractor
for their first view of the planet. The following night Lowell recorded his
first impressions with the 18-inch refractor: "Southern Sea at end first
and Hourglass Sea . . . about equally intense. . . . Terminator shaded, limb
sharp and mist-covered forked-bay vanishes like river in desert."24 Lowell's
use of the word desert is remarkable, for it contains the kernel of his later
theory about the planet. Perhaps Lowell's imagination had already been captured
by the lonely desert south of Flagstaff, whose appearance as seen from one
of the San Francisco Range peaks he later described:
The resemblance of its lambent saffron to the telescopic
tints of the Martian globe is strikingly impressive. Far forest and still
farther desert are transmuted by distance into mere washes of color, the
one robin's-egg blue, the other roseate ochre, and so bathed, both, in the
flood of sunshine from out of a cloudless burnished sky that their tints rival
those of a fire-opal. None otherwise do the Martian colors stand out upon
the disk at the far end of the journey down the telescope's tube. Even in
its mottlings the one expanse recalls the other.25
Lowell and Pickering recorded the canal Lethes on June 7, and Lowell gloated:
"This is the first canal seen here this opposition, and in all likelihood
the first seen anywhere." Two days later he found it "very broad and glimpsed
double," but still a novice to the astronomical trade, he doubted himself:
"These sudden revelation peeps may or may not be the truth." On June 19 he
wrote: "With the best will in the world I can certainly see no canals."26
After only a month of observing, Lowell returned to Boston, leaving the
observatory in the hands of Pickering and Douglass. In Lowell's absence,
Pickering attempted to measure the polarization of light from one of the
dark areas but found that the reflected light from Mars was not polarized.
This meant that the area was probably not covered with water.27 Douglass,
meanwhile, was verifying Pickering's 1892 observation that there were canals
crisscrossing the dark areas. The evidence was clearly growing that these
areas were not seas after all. But if not seas, then what?
Lowell returned to Flagstaff in early August. When the observations of
Mars had begun, in June, it had been early spring in the Martian southern
hemisphere; now it was getting into high summer---the soufflé-thin
polar cap was melting rapidly, and Lowell noted a dark band around it, which
he described as a "ring of antarctic ocean."28 Later, the antarctic sea also
disappeared, while corresponding changes took place in the dark areas located
in the southern hemisphere---what had at first appeared as a uniform dark
belt stretching "unbroken from the Hourglass Sea [Syrtis Major] to the columns
of Hercules" had begun to break up into islands and peninsulas. "It will
at once be seen how this bit of evidence fits into the other," Lowell suggested.
"If the polar sea were thus to descend in a vast freshet toward the equator
such are the appearances the freshet might be expected to present. As the
water progressed farther and farther north the regions it left behind would
gradually dry up, and from having appeared greenish-blue would take on an
arid reddish-yellow tint; precisely what is observed to take place."29 Regarding
whether the changes in tint from blue-green to reddish yellow were due to
the arrival and subsequent retreat of water itself or merely its vapor, Lowell
hedged. "Either water itself or vegetation its consequence would show us
the first color while deserts would show the last," he wrote. "The configuration
of the seas would likewise be explicable on either hypothesis. It would merely
be a question of present seas or past sea-bottoms. . . . The probability
is that these areas are in part water, in part fertile land."30 Although
he had arrived in Flagstaff accepting the Schiaparellian maritime theory
of the dark areas on Mars, he was now embracing the Liais-Pickering vegetation
theory.
The canals too, which he was now sketching prolifically and in essentially
Schiaparellian form, followed the general development of the broader features
of the disk. "They do not all begin to develop at the same season," he announced.
"Those nearest the south pole start first. The Solis Lacus is the one to
lead off the list. Then the others follow in their order north. . . . Some
weeks elapse after the water has to all appearance gone down the disk before
the canals appear; a delay of just about the length of time it would take
vegetation to sprout."31 The dark spots at the juncture of the canals, which
Pickering in 1892 had called lakes, were also seen to change, not in size
but in color. They seemed to deepen in hue, and this too was suggestive:
When we put all these facts together, the presence
of the spots at the junctions of the canals, their apparent invariability
[in] size, their seasonal darkening, and last but not least the resemblance
of the great equatorial regions of Mars to the deserts of our Earth, one
solution instantly suggests itself of their character, to wit: that they
are oases in the midst of that desert.
Here then we have an end and reason for the existence of canals and the
most natural one conceivable---namely that the canals are constructed for
the express purpose of fertilizing the oases. . . . And just such inference
of design is in keeping with the curiously systematic arrangement of the
canals themselves. . . . The whole system is trigonometric to a degree.32
In short, Mars was a world well on the way to utter desiccation. It was
inhabited, and its inhabitants, in order to survive, had had to built a
vast system of irrigation canals to transport precious water from the melting
polar caps. This, in a nutshell, was Lowell's "theory," and needless to say,
it created an immediate sensation.
Despite having observed the planet through only a single opposition, Lowell,
in a spurt of manic energy, blitzed the press with his sensational results.
He had begun publishing a series of articles on Mars in W. W. Payne's journal
Popular Astronomy even before the opposition was over, and he followed that
up with a similar series in the Atlantic Monthly. In February 1895 he gave
a series of well-attended lectures in Boston's Huntington Hall, then concluded,
finally, in December 1895 with his first book on the red planet, entitled
simply Mars, in which he described in detail his observations and conclusions
therefrom. Lowell's drawings and maps were even stranger than those Schiaparelli
had published. To some extent this can be attributed to the fact that Lowell,
for all his undoubted and diverse talents, was, as Carl Sagan has pointed
out, "unfortunately one of the worst draftsmen who ever sat down at the telescope
and the kind of Mars that he drew was composed of little polygonal blocks
connected by a multitude of straight lines."33 To that I would add only
that Pickering and Douglass were, if anything, even more maladept draftsmen!
Lowell's theory of intelligent life on Mars unleashed a firestorm of controversy.
The public was fascinated, while professional astronomers generally viewed
him with suspicion; some were openly hostile. Lowell had opened his Popular
Astronomy series by attributing the failure of skeptics to see the evidence
to the fact that they had not observed the planet in steady enough air. He
added: "No amateur need despair of getting interesting observations because
of the relative smallness of his object-glass. . . . In matters of planetary
detail size of aperture is not the all-essential thing. . . . A large glass
in poor air will not show what a small glass will in good air."34 Undoubtedly
Lowell was a fast study, but it is still remarkable that he could write this
after only one month of observing Mars at Flagstaff! Later, he condemned
the use of large reflecting telescopes for planetary work as well, calling
them "well-nigh worthless."35 After reading such sweeping comments, James
Keeler, then at the Allegheny Observatory in Pittsburgh, complained to George
Ellery Hale: "I dislike his style. . . . It is dogmatic and amateurish. One
would think he was the first man to use a telescope on Mars, and that he was
entitled to decide offhand questions relating to the efficiency of instruments;
and he draws no line between what he sees and what he infers."36 Hale and
Keeler, who were the coeditors of the influential Astrophysical Journal, eventually
declined to publish any of Lowell's submissions in their journal.
Lowell's Martian theory immediately made him one of the most prominent
men in Boston, and he did not appear to mind the celebrity, at least judging
by a vignette from about this time related by Ferris Greenslet:
He had bought for his life en garçon a small
high house on the upper side of West Cedar Street. There during the winter
a young editor and publisher from New York, passing with a bag of manuscripts
to his own modest establishment in the next block, used to observe him every
weekday at five-thirty. His handsome head was to be seen vis-à-vis
the Boston Evening Transcript beneath a life-sized plaster Venus similar to
those that infest the Athenaeum. Visibility was perfect, for the shade was
always raised to the very top of the window as if to admit no impediment to
a message from Mars.37
After seeing his book Mars through the press in December 1895, Lowell
set sail for Europe to confer with eminent Martian observers there. In Paris,
he dined with Flammarion in his apartment on the Rue Cassini, describing
the occasion in a letter to his father: "There were fourteen of us, and all
that could sat in chairs of the zodiac, under a ceiling of pale blue sky,
appropriately dotted with fleecy clouds, and indeed most prettily painted.
Flammarion is nothing if not astronomical. His whole apartment, which is itself
au cinquieme, blossoms with such decoration."38 In addition to their mutual
interest in Mars and extraterrestrial life, the two men shared a fascination
with the occult---Lowell, as we have seen, had held séances in his
house in Japan, and Flammarion sometimes invited mediums to his Paris apartment.
Flammarion had from the first commended Lowell for founding "an observatory
inspired, as that at Juvisy, with the dominant idea of studying the conditions
of life on the surface of the planets of our system."39 He subsequently recognized
the importance of Lowell's Martian observations, which were, he wrote, "of
the highest interest, though certainly controversial, and they advance our
knowledge of the planet, even if we do not accept them as definitive."40
He could not, however, bring himself to accept Lowell's conclusion that the
dark areas were tracts of vegetation. He still regarded them as seas, although,
he admitted, they were in many places probably little more than marshes.41
From Paris, Lowell traveled on to Milan, where he met the man he admired
above all others and always referred to as cher maître Martien. What
Schiaparelli's expectations of the American may have been are less certain,
though he later confided to François Terby: "It is certain that Lowell
commands superior means to any hitherto employed on Mars. If his perseverance
and enthusiasm do not desert him, he will make considerable contributions
to areography; on the other hand, he needs more experience, and must rein
in his imagination."42
At about this time the Milan astronomer was becoming increasingly aware
of problems with his eyesight; while observing Mars, he confided to Terby,
he was troubled by "a diminution of the sensibility to weak illuminations;
I attribute this to the observations of Mercury near the Sun carried out
from 1882 to 1890."43 Moreover, the air over the growing and increasingly
polluted city of Milan was no longer as tranquil as it once was. Finally,
in May 1898, Schiaparelli announced his retirement from observational work:
The time has come to let others take over the careful
study of the phenomena of Mars. I will publish my observations, in the hope
that time will resolve the feelings of doubt and distrust with which they
are received by nearly one and all. Whoever wishes to study Mars successfully,
must have a keen eye (like my left eye; my right is useless for observations),
and must work in a calm atmosphere with a telescope that is able to concentrate
the rays in the red part of the spectrum---the other rays must be eliminated
with a colored glass. Add to this as prerequisites long practice and great
prudence in the conclusions one draws from the observations.44
But though his eyes were no longer keen enough to place him in the first
rank of planetary observers---indeed, he published none of the observations
he made after 1890---Schiaparelli nevertheless remained the leading authority
on Mars, and his pronouncements on the subject were eagerly awaited. In 1893
he penned a widely quoted paper titled "Il Pianeta Marte," in which he suggested
that the canals were in all probability natural features produced during
the evolution of the planet---perhaps similar to the English Channel or the
Channel of Mozambique. When he turned to a consideration of the geminations,
however, he admitted that it was difficult to think of a natural explanation:
"Their singular aspect, and their being drawn with absolute geometrical precision,
as if they were the work of rule or compass, has led some to see in them
the work of intelligent beings, inhabitants of the planet. I am very careful
not to combat this supposition, which includes nothing impossible."45
By 1895, Schiaparelli was not only "careful not to combat" the supposition,
he seems to have embraced it. That year he published another widely quoted
paper, "La Vita sul Pianeta Marte" (The life of the planet Mars), in which
he wrote that the idea that the geminations were perhaps best explained as
owing to the activity of intelligent beings "ought not to be regarded as
an absurdity."46 On the contrary, he said, "one cannot [otherwise] comprehend
how in the same valley the moisture and vegetation sometimes make a single
line, in other cases two parallel lines of unequal breadth and separated
by unequal intervals, between which remains a sterile space deprived of water.
Here, the intervention of intelligent thought seems well indicated."47
He proceeded to work out the details of a system of locks and dikes that
would both regulate the water flow on Mars for the convenience of the inhabitants
and also satisfy the observations made from Earth. A remarkable performance!
Yet Schiaparelli insisted that he did not mean to be taken seriously and
closed with the comment, "I leave now to any lecturer who cares to do so to
continue these considerations; as for me, I am descended from a hippogriff."48
To Flammarion he sent a copy of the paper, on which he wrote at the top of
the page, "Semel in anno licet insanire" (Once a year it is permissible to
act like a madman).49 Once again he remained, to the exasperation of his contemporaries,
impenetrable when it came to his true views about the nature of the canals.
Though he later gave Lowell's theories a sympathetic hearing, writing
in 1897 that the system of canals "presents an indescribable simplicity
and symmetry which cannot be the work of chance," and telling Lowell himself,
"Your theory of vegetation becomes more and more probable,"50 he refused to
commit himself. To inquiries about the nature of the canals, he continued
to respond, "I don't know!"51 In an 1899 review of Lowell's observations,
he struck an all-too-familiar note of agnosticism, writing that the nature
of the canals was still "entirely obscure, despite the theories, oftentimes
pretty and very ingenious, which they have occasioned."52 Twenty-two years
had passed since he had discovered the remarkable network, yet it remained
a source of bewilderment to him. In this respect he was far from being alone.
E. M. Antoniadi, Flammarion's assistant at Juvisy, wrote of the "canal deadlock"
and recalled this as a time when "everything was darkness to all."
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