The Portland daily press., 1892-07-29
A CALL FROM mars.
The Planet Nearer Than Ever in the
History Of the Universe.
1880 Miles Via Lick Telescope - On
August 8 Nlars VIII Mako the Regular
aOnce-in-Fifteen-y Year" Visit - The
Planet and Its History.
IcoPYRIGHT, 1892.


Not the warlike son of Jupiter and
Juno, not he who met defeat in the
cause of Diomed, not he who lowered
his crest before the intellectual might
of Athena, but a great world like ours,
another planet with seasons and with
moons, with atmosphere and with life.
Mars will be 1880 miles from us,
nearer than planet ever approached
planet in the history of the universe.
But this 1850 miles must be multiplied
very heavily to get the actual distance.
1t will be 1880 miles via the great
Lick telescope, but S5,00o,000 miles Ii
YOU want to reach it through space.
This IS, 900, 900 mark is as near as Mars
ever comes to the earth, and when it
starts on the circuit of its orbit it man.
ages to get 141, 900, 900 miles away from
Tammany and the Mckinley bill as
maximum distance, and then it
comes back again to see ii they
are still alive. ALI this vast dis
tance, inconceivable by the puny
minds of puny men, is travelled over in
fifteen years. So the last visit was In
1877 and the one before that in 1862.
And on those two occasions we learned
more about our next door neighbor
than in all the centuries of civilization
before. In 1877 Astronomer Hall, of
Washington, astonished the world by
proclaiming the discovery Of the moons
of Mars, and took away at the same
time the breath of the scientists and the
poetry out of the famous line:
Snow poles of moonless Mars.
He named these lunar bodies DEMOS
and Phobos. For time he imagined
he saw innumerable moons cavorting
through space about the planet. They
were going at such rapid pace that
MIR. Hall found it pretty hard to keep
track of them. But he finally noted
that the smaller one was within very
few miles of the planet and the larger
one far off. But it would be impossible
to squeeze a third moon in between
Phobos and Mars. There is one thing
about Mars that will make the funny
men weep. They don't know what
full moon is up there. Nor, at the poles
of the planet, do they ever catch even
glimpse of these lunar bodies. So the
Mars comic papers must have hard
row to hoe.
was asking an astronomer whether
in this period of opposition it will real
" be possible for us to learn with def
siniteness the nature of the life in the
planet Mars.
Hardly" said he, 'sexcept from con-
ditions. Still, suppose we should see
the forty-seventh problem of Euclid
mapped out on the mountains of the
planet on some gigantic scale. It would
be absolute evidence not alone of life,
but of intelligent life; OLA progressive
age like our own"
Furthermore, Mars is an older planet
than ours. There are those who claim
that we will find absolute evidence
during these observations OF its de-
cadence Prof. A. Winchell afirrns that
Mars was habitable nine and a half
million years ago, and that our obser-
vations now will be convincing of its
refrigeration. In fact Prof. Winchen
asserts that Mars is no longer lingering
In the terrestrial stage, but has lost
all water and atmosphere and is adj
vanced far toward total refrigeration.
But Prof. Holden, Prof Hall, Prof.
Pickering and Camille F'lammarion OPP
pose that theory and adduce most inter-
esting observations to prove that not
alone is there an atmosphere in Mars,
but that its climate is very much like
that of our own planet. The melting
of the ice regions during the summer
period on Mars is one of the main argu-
ments advanced. Then, too, the spec
trum analysis has led to the inevitable
conclusion that the atmosphere on Mars