OCR Text |
Show MARS AND THE ASTRONOMERS. ASTRONO-MERS. Schiaparclli, Tesla and the rest of the gentry who uphold the canal theory regarding the markings sup- posed to have been discovered on our red-headed celestial neighbor Mars, ought to take a reef in their theorizing and give ' us something more consonant with reason. The two planets are now nearer together than they have been for several years or than they will be for two years more, when the gulf intervening will be still further narrowed by some 2,000,000 miles; but the situation for observations, is at this time very favorable fav-orable and the greater part of the earth's people, being unscientific and yet desirous of knowing something of the Martians, if any there be, have to look to the other class for information infor-mation beyond that afforded through the unaided visual sense. So far they don't get much if any, and all tho theories advanced arc so (lacking in the important clement of reasonableness reasonable-ness that the clown's conclusions would be just as valuable. To our uncultured mind the canal proposition is too preposterous to merit a moment's mo-ment's consideration, as anyone may sec who gives the matter sufficient thought. Mars his a little more tnan half the diamcte of the earth and about one-sevcni. of its bulk; some of those "canals" which the astro- mers say they have seen and gone ' so far as to make diagrams of extend ex-tend more than half way across the disc and would thereby be considerably consider-ably more than 2000 miles long. A pretty healthy sort of canal, that I Then let it be considered that there is a regular gridiron of these, mostly shorter, and then some of .thenv are duplex affairs, the lines of gemination being as true as the rails on a railway! rail-way! The total of these "conduils," if put end to end, would be a mons-, mons-, ter affair, not less than 30,000 miles - long! But the monstrosity of the I thing does not end even here. Of course those markings are not seen I in ordinary telescopes; nor even in the I few most powerful ones except under J the most favorable conditions; and to 1 be seen then they must have a width of more than 30 miles. Now let some school boy, one who has plenty ot time during this vacation period and t who feels sufficiently interested, bor- !row a few slates, go to work and find out how many cubic yards of Earth I (or Mars either) there' arc in 30,000 miles of excavation 30 miles wide and say only 25 feet deep; then allowing that one man can shovel up as much as three men, and teams can haul away, how many men and horses and how many years would it take to complete com-plete the Martian "canal system.'' Let him have plenty of slates before he starts in, for he may need them; and when the job is finished he will be quite as weary as one of the laborers on those aqueducts' when the latter ' Rot through, and will know just as much about it as Schiaparelli or any other man. |