IS MARS INHABITED?

Taranaki Daily News, Volume L, Issue 61, 16 November 1907, Page 3

IS MARS INHABITED?

Apropos of the well-known theories o l ' Professor Lowell with regard to the oistciice of intelligent living beings on the planet Mars, .Mr \Y. E. Garrett Fisher in a recent article explained that -Mars is the only planet besides the Tarth where it seems at all possible that life—at any rate what we may call human or sentient life—can exist. The. article then described the grounds of Professor Lowell's conelu-iivv.s, a* Set forth in his recent work, "Mars and its Canals''—namely, that in Mars we are watching the intelligent struggle of an ancient anil powerful race against the hard conditions of life in a moribund planet. "The greater part of Mars is a desert, waste and arid, resembling the Sahara or the Desert of fJobi on our own planet. The third and, in many ways, the most remarkable phenomenon presented by Mars in the telescope is the Network of so-called canals, which intersect .... in all directions, and which Mr Lowell believes to form a i wonderful and uiii(|ue svstem of irri«at:on, by which the scanty water of the dying planet is annually conducted from the melting polar snows ti> the cultivated throughout Mars. The Earth can show no natural phenomenon and i"-i". artificial one on the same scale which in any way resembles tlie-e singular canals. which are in some cases as much as 3000 miles long and sixty miles in width. Their almost invariable straightness and the orderly way in which they «-am the planets' surface leads us to the further conclusion that tltcy are the work of design—the Titanic works of a powerful and co-operative population. All this may be taken as absolutely established by the work 0{ Mr I.ewcll and his fellow-astronomers.