# Percival Lowell — an afterglow/Prelude

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PRELUDE
I
A MAN of moods," Dr. Lowell called himself, and this he was, as the writer can attest after being associated with him in his work almost daily for many years. He changed in an instant from writing sober science to narrating a telling story to a friend who happened in, taking the keenest interest in visiting with him as if he had nothing else to occupy his mind. The masterly ease with which he wrote of astronomy or attended to mundane affairs was extraordinary. At Flagstaff he would often leave his computations for a bit of exercise on the mesa to explore a cañon near by. In the midst of dining he might be impelled to rush to his dome for a study of the heavens; also he might be wakened from his slumbers at the necromantic hour before dawn that he could revel in its splendor and then exclaim: "I have been so overcome by her roseate blush of surprised confusion that I feel like an impertinent intruder who would better have waited until expected by the Sun." In such ways he showed his marvellous versatility in work and mood.
II
Dr. Lowell was "a charming host"—as his friend Mr. George Agassiz so well described him in his beautiful tribute. "He liked to have people come—and he liked to have them go!" he was heard to say many times. He cordially greeted people from everywhere at his mountain home and was solicitous that they should have due courtesies given them by his assistants in the dome and by the servants in his house. He was pained if he felt that anyone had been slighted—though a stranger to him. For two and twenty years he elicited much acclaim from travellers from Asia and Europe, from California and our East, who visited the Observatory as they passed through Flagstaff. They all became conscious that he felt keenly the responsibility of being Director and their host. He was simple as he was forceful; and yet at heart he was a hermit. Of an evening one usually found him alone by his fireside with his after-dinner cigar, or rather cigars, for smoking was with him a passion. Frequently, he smilingly quoted the saying: "The only excuse for a dinner is the cigar that follows."
III
Possessed of splendid enthusiasms all phases of life interested him. His jocular moods were delightful. The following extract from a letter received by the author from one of Dr. Lowell's Oxford friends will show how this trait of the many-sided man strongly impressed itself upon those about him:—
". . . I well remember the first or it may be the second time he was at this house. I had a lot of boys here, as I often do, lassoing and shooting in the garden, and the eager boyish way in which he joined them and shot and ran too, and the echo of his laughter as he did it is one of the pleasantest memories of the garden that come back to me. Also, I like to think of him at Flagstaff and the very happy fortnight when I enjoyed his hospitality there. Do you remember how we all tested our unaided eyesight on the big advertisement stuck up on the side of a drygoods store in Flagstaff,—we trying to draw it from the outside of the Observatory, and not verifying it with the telescope till we each had had a shot?"
Driven to his piazza one rainy day to lunch, because of alterations in the dining room, he jocosely named the picture on page 22—taken then—"A Silly-Wet Day!" He was a wit. His bon mots kept his guests in laughter. His dinner stories were sans pareils; sans reproches.
​At one time, before enclosing the Observatory grounds at Flagstaff, cows, horses and burros from the town took pleasure in coming up the trail, sheep fashion, to trespass there: much to the annoyance of the Director. To an English servant, he had at the time, he said: "Harry, if these intruders come up again get out your shot-gun and pepper them." Harry, with his correct manners, promptly and politely replied, "Yes, sir." Dr. Lowell forgot the incident until the next day, when he received a telephone message from the owner of a Jersey cow that his servant had peppered her with shot. This literal obedience cost Dr. Lowell several dollars, but he treated it gaily.
"A SILLY-WET DAY"
IV
His best friend in the far West was Judge Edward M. Doe, of Flagstaff; and his own words: "We insensibly find those persons congenial whose ideas resemble ours, and gravitate to them as leaves on a pond do to one another, nearer and nearer until they touch," are exemplified by this friendship. He found there, in the wilds, this learned gentleman. And his greatest delight was to dine with him, picnic, climb the mountains, scan the cañons, or what not, and discuss at large with him subjects of law. Indeed so well versed was Dr. Lowell, legally, that an outsider overhearing these conversations would have thought him a member of the bar or mistaken him for a judge himself.
AS A HARVARD STUDENT
V
His mind was, it is said, incomparably brilliant. His "mental altitudes" helped make the name Lowell illustrious. Soon after his graduation from Harvard, his cousin, James Russell Lowell, spoke of him as the "most brilliant man in Boston" and his later years brought only a fuller flowering of his early superior genius. His books have been translated into foreign languages, including even Chinese. And in his lectures: in these, as through a rift in the clouds like a star, he shone, while his audiences sat spellbound. He was a marvel to those who heard him. Many will remember that in his last lecture course before the Lowell Institute in Boston (later crystallized into permanent form), standing room was nil, and demands for admission were so numerous and insistent that repetitions were arranged for the evenings. At these repeated lectures the streets near by were filled with motors and carriages as if it were grand opera night! At the termination of this magnificent course there appeared in the Boston Transcript "Percival Lowell's Q. E. D." in which the writer said: "Lowell's lectures on Mars are among the most memorable ever delivered at that Institute, bearing his family name, which has commanded the services of the most eminent of the world's scholars in all lines of thought and research. He has bridged the gap which astronomers pointed out years ago in his ​revelations concerning Mars between the condition of habitability and that of being inhabited. . . . This is a brave and brilliant débût for the new science, or rather new department of astronomy which Professor Lowell has named 'planetology,' and which is to concern itself rather with the development and life of the planets themselves than with their external relations, their place in a system, their period of revolution, or their cosmic origin and destiny in the scheme of the universe. Is there another planet, however, upon which there is any present opportunity to pursue planetological studies with equal facilities and the probability of similarly brilliant rewards? With Mars the deductions from postulates and analogies drawn from terrestrial data and laws could be confirmed from certain visible facts. But if there be no other as promising field, Mr. Lowell's wisdom in concentrating on Mars is justified the more and the thanks of the world have been well earned by his devotion to it." A fitting appreciation this is of Dr. Lowell's masterful achievements.
Another writer referred to a page in his "Mars" as the most brilliant one in literature. He said:
". . . As I was watching the planet, I saw suddenly two points like stars flash out in the midst of the polar cap. Dazzlingly bright upon the duller white background of the snow, these stars shone for a few moments and then slowly disappeared. The seeing at the time was very good. It is at once evident what the other-world apparitions were,— ​not the fabled signal-lights of Martian folk, but the glint of ice-slopes flashing for a moment earthward as the rotation of the planet turned the slope to the proper angle; just as, in sailing by some glass-windowed house near set of sun, you shall for a moment or two catch a dazzling glint of glory from its panes, which then vanishes as it came. But though no intelligence lay behind the action of these lights, they were none the less startling for being Nature's own flash-lights across one hundred millions of miles of space. It had taken them nine minutes to make the journey; nine minutes before they reached the Earth they had ceased to be on Mars, and, after their travel of one hundred millions of miles, found to note them but one watcher, alone on a hilltop with the dawn."
Dr. Lowell lectured abroad also with distinguished effect. He addressed the Royal Institution of Great Britain; and in their native tongues spoke to large audiences in Paris and Berlin. In France he was often mistaken for a Frenchman so fluently and purely did he use the nation's language. He was also at home in Korea and Japan where he spoke and wrote with comparative ease the complicated speech of these Oriental lands. Students of his books on Japan are much impressed by his acquaintance with the psychology of the Japanese people. He had what may be named a unique faculty, that of being able to free himself for the nonce from his own Western culture, and superposing it—if you will—upon the mysticism ​of the Far East. He was, if one may be forgiven for putting it in that form, the "missing link" which connected and organically related the Soul of the West with the Soul of the East.
Dr. Lowell was fifty years ahead of his time as will be realized in later years by the young people who heard him lecture, and who studied the Lowell Observatory Exhibits of explorations of the heavens at Flagstaff. These exhibits, on transparencies, illuminated by transmitted light, were shown by invitation at centres of education like the American Museum of Natural History; Princeton University; Vassar College; the Boston Public Library; Brown University and elsewhere, where they aroused the enthusiasm of thousands of visitors.
These exhibits were not only beautiful but wonderful. They represented, so everyone might see, discoveries which could be made only at Flagstaff. They were the most advanced and remarkable exhibitions of the kind that the world had ever seen. Appreciated as this was by the older public, Dr. Lowell believed that the most important interest the exhibit could gain was the interest of youth. He began one of his last lectures by saying: "The value of a lecture consists not so much in the body of learning it may be able to impart as in the inspiration it gives others to pursue knowledge for themselves. Especially is this true when the lecture is delivered before an audience of youth. For those entering upon life are the most important hearers a lecturer can ever address. Youth is the ​period of possibilities. Then it is that the mind is open, plastic to impressions which at the same time it is most potent to retain. . . .
"Plasticity of mind is the premise to possibility of performance. To retain it longest is the great essential to success. For the ability to succeed has been defined as not having to stop till you get there. In this more than in any other one quality does the great man differ from his fellows: in the gift of perpetual youth. We are told that the good die young; our regret being father to the thought. But certain it is that the great die young even though they pass the Psalmist's limit of three score and ten. The plasticity of their mental makeup is the elixir of life poor Ponce de Leon sought in vain.
"This possibility confronts all of us at the threshold of our career. Not that we are all born with like endowment nor that we all can attain it later. But we can all approach nearer our goal by keeping it constantly before us through the procession of the years. Especially important is it, then, at the start to set one's mind and ambition on that which is best. In the trenchant, if trivial, words of an Ivy orator of years ago at Harvard to his classmates: 'Fellows, don't be content to sit on the fence; sit on the roof. And remember that climbing there does not safely consist in leaps and bounds but in throwing one's heart upward and then persistently pursuing it step by step.'"
VI
Dr. Lowell was of the athletic type though not devoted to sports. At one time he owned the fastest polo pony between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. He was fond of tennis and walking, but averse to golf and motoring. He usually took a train to a certain point where his motor car would meet him merely to transport him from tree to tree that he might pay his respects to the oaks and beeches he so much admired. . . . How little things entered into his big life is shown in his seed planting with its results. The photographs opposite picture the fruit of his last harvest at Flagstaff. Gourds were his pets, with squashes and pumpkins a close second. In that last autumn on Mars' Hill the fruits of his culture would worthily have graced a thank-offering to the gods.
HIS LAST HARVEST
VII
As an explorer he stood on the tops of all the mountain peaks that came his way, and equally did he like descending to the abysms of cañons. But, indeed, he did not wait for the mountains to come to him; he sought them in the remotest corners of the earth; going to the sacred mountain of Ontaké in Japan; up the glaciers of the Alps and over the walls and chimneys of the Pyrenees. Speaking of Ontaké and the pilgrim clubs peculiar to it, he said:—
"As the chant swelled it sounded like, and yet unlike, some fine processional of the Church of Rome. And as it rolled along, it touched a chord that waked again the vision of the mountain, and once more before me rose Ontaké, and I saw the long file of pilgrims tramping steadily up the slope.
"Thus, humble though their active members be, the Ontaké pilgrim clubs furnish society not to be found in any other clubs on earth; the company of heaven is to be had for the asking. For the Ontaké pilgrim clubs are the only clubs in the world whose honorary members are, not naval officers, not distinguished foreigners, not princely figureheads, but gods."
THE SAN FRANCISCO PEAKS
Which he ascended in quest of trees
​botanical love! Study of the trees was his chief delight in his tramps afield. In a book in manuscript on "Peaks and Plateaux in the Effect on Tree Life," presented to the writer by Dr. Lowell, he shows a deep interest and an unusual knowledge of the subject. This is an account of his ascent of the San Francisco Peaks, of Arizona, in quest of trees. He found them aplenty in the respective zones which he has thus defined:—
| Douglas | Fir | at | 8700 | ft. |
| Silver | " ? | " | 9350 | " |
| Cork | " | " | 9480 | " |
In this charming fashion he describes his original observations:—"From the great height at which it first appeared, from the question mark given the identification at the time, and lastly from the same doubt expressing itself when it was encountered upon the descent upon the face of the mountain, it is probable that the supposed Silver Fir was Cork Fir and it will be provisionally considered. The Cork Fir is a tree of high habit, intermediate between the Fir and Spruce zones though belonging properly to the former. This surprising and truly spectacular Fir is a peculiarity of the San Francisco Peaks in Arizona. Relatively so unknown is it that botanists visiting the region are taken to it at their request as a natural curiosity and it has not yet found its way into the tree books."
​silent witness to his originality, as his discoveries in this field were various and his nomenclature unique. From the trees on the heights he characteristically jumped to the flora on the table-land below as he himself beautifully expresses on the opposite page. He found a new Ash-tree in a canon in Arizona which will bear his name.
In all parts of the world, nature touched him alike from the Peaks of Arizona to the Woods of Fontainebleau and the plum-trees of Korea.
In prose writing he excelled. In poetry he at times was touched with the Divine fire. The following is a sparkling gem of that which even great poets might be proud to say "this is mine own." It is poetry of a high order. It follows the established rules of rhythm and rhyme and attains its object in the loveliest and simplest measures. It will serve to show one of the varied moods that went to make up the mentality and spiritual essence of Dr. Lowell.
"In Fontainebleau, whence now the light of day Is shut by oaks, vast glaciers once held sway, In undisputed ice their lateral moraines With grasping fingers stretched to clutch the plains. Gone all are now, their very memory sleeps Save for the vigil one poor mourner keeps, The falling teardrop of the 'rock that weeps.'"
VIII
It will readily be understood that the question of site is of fundamental importance to an astronomer who wishes to solve the mysteries of the heavens. Dr. Lowell spared neither time nor money to meet this need, and he travelled far and wide in search of what he termed: "the best procurable air." In Japan; in the Maritime-Alps, Algeria, Mexico, California and Arizona, he diligently searched. Finally he found a plateau at Flagstaff, Arizona, at an altitude of about 7000 ft., which he discovered to be the best for his purpose. In this rarefied atmosphere his superb 24-inch refractor proved to be, according to the Hartmann test, the greatest space-penetrating telescope in existence. Under such favoring conditions he and his staff could observe and photograph stars fainter than any ever before brought into mortal ken.
Always with marvellous accuracy did he transcribe the wonders that he saw. As if by magic they appeared on paper from his pencil and brush, replicas of the planets themselves;—he was an artist as well as an artisan.
His big telescope was worked day and night; and while he often made important discoveries by daylight observation, sentimentally as well as astronomically he was fonder of those gained at night. He liked to recall the fitting words of his friend and colleague M. Camille Flammarion:
​ "Sweet hours of evening do not flee away! We love this universal calm which surrounds Nature before it sleeps. We love this unchangeable peace which descends from the rising stars! The starry sky which lights up the Earth which falls asleep, these are the spectacles which draw us away from a world of clamorous passions—pleasures of the soul which we enjoy in peace."
THE TELESCOPE HERE WORKED DAY AND NIGHT
IX
Dr. Lowell himself has said, "How little the momentary living counts with the actual life"; but this was a paradox, for with him every moment counted. He was indefatigable. To those associated with him in his work he appeared never to withdraw from mathematics and astronomy—yet he found time for everything. His daily motto was "not the possible but the impossible." That he could indulge in and accomplish what he did in so short a life, comparatively, is astounding. In suggesting that anything should be done, even a trivial matter, he always added "at once!" Procrastination and he were strangers. When he bethought himself to publish an essay or a bulletin it was "no sooner said than done." His assistants were swept along in their various works on the crest of the wave of his enthusiasm. He was buoyant with strength, ambition, love, sincerity, nobleness of purpose, in fact, all that is highest in life. He was a dynamic force, yet gentle as a child. Indeed, his strongest characteristic was kindness of heart. Ever on the alert was he for deeds of kindness and for unapplauded service to his fellow man.
Instinctively the world associates him with the planet Mars. All the world loves the man of ideas who has the courage of his convictions. After continuous research, he was thoroughly convinced ​that life exists on Mars; and he has left, for us, a full record of his reasons for so thinking. It is not essential that one should agree with him, or have his point of view in order to enjoy his utterances. All that he himself would have asked of his readers was an acknowledgment, actual or virtual, of his honesty of purpose. He went so far as to say in his final lecture tour through the Northwest:—"That Mars is inhabited we have absolute proof."
His successors in this sublime investigation assuredly will be guided by the same love of scientific truth that animated him. He has left in store all the material resources with which to build an enduring monument. Filled by the warmth of his fire; thrilled by his achievements, with eye single towards the discovery of "the light that shifts, the glare that drifts"—which is truth itself—we rest content in the thought that those who follow in his field will keep clear, widen and extend the scientific trail in which he was the master-pioneer.
QUOTATIONS