Daily Arizona silver belt., 1908-01-26
SAYS WORLD WILL BECOME
 BIG DESERT
INTERESTING THEORY OF FAM. oUs SCIENTIST OF FLAG
 STAFF.

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz, January 22.-- Ut is the doom of the earth.' sait Professor Percival Lowell of this city in his lecture before the College elul of Boston, "to be covered with des erts like Mars, and the time will come when water in this world of ours will be far more precious than gold.o
 With the aid of stereopticon views many of them photographic transparen cies, MT. Lowell sketched the fresh evidence which has been obtained al the Lowell observatory here of the ex istenee of intelligent beings on the planet Mars.
 Schiaparelli, he said, "saw these lines in 1877, and his map of them promptly met with universal eondemna. tion. But the world made rash step in denying his observation of the canals for time was perfectly sure to prove their existence. In 1877 only one man saw them, but We have now dozen men who have not only seen them, but have seen them very much better than he did. We have much better instru. ments, we have accumulated the knowl. edge of what to look for, and our ob. servers are better trained. We have pushed Sehiaparelli s researches very much farther, and now the curious thing is the complete disappearance of the men who ten years ago denied the very existence of the canals. v
 oh oL that the polar caps of Mars are snow and not solidiied carbonie acid, and that the temperature of the planet is such as to enable it to support life, Professor Lowell went on to say:
 "The Kinetic theory of matter re- minds us that small body will lose it's gases rapidly as compared with a larger one, and that is why the moon has al- ready lost its air For like reasons the seas pass away, and though Mars once had seas, there are none on the planet now, and no aceumulations of water more than twenty miles avross. The only water left in Mars is that which is gathered semi-annually at its polar caps. Mars thus lacks water supply, and, leaving out the questions of canals, we are led to recognize from the gen, eral conditions of the planet that it supports some form of organic life-a form which is peculiarly and manifcstly behodcn to the polar cars.
 "Thc light areas of Mars. of rose. ochrc color, exactly resembling in hue the deserts of Arizona, are the deserts of the planet; the dark areas are un- questiOnably areas of vegetation.
 "Then there are the canals, which show a surprising network of lines con meeting with one another and with the polar caps. At the Flagstaff observa- tory these canals have been greatly multiplied as we'll as greatly reduced in size. The better the lines are seen the more absolutely straight and geomet. rical they become and the narrower they turn out to be- The canals are in the dark as we'll as in the light re- gions, showing that the dark regions cannot be water. The lines are about ten miles in width, and not more than fifteen. They always appear in the same places.
 "There are many markings on the planet like dots. and the canals run into the dots, sometimes fourteen lines centering in one of them. One of the dots is isolated, and there is no canal which is not connected with its neigh bor and eventually with one of it's polar caps.
 "In one season the canals are mere gossamer lines, only to be seen with great difficulty. But six weeks or a month later, after the melting of the polar snows, the lines come out with insistence, and their increasing visibil ity makes a regular progression down the disk of the planet.
 "There is evidently a wave which starts from the polar cap and sweeps over the disk of Mars, and is succeeded six months later by contrary wave from the opposite pole. The lines show bluish-grCen as the water brings out the vegetation; they turn gold-brown towara autumn.
 Professor Brown also spoke of the mysterious doubling of the lines, con corning the cause of which nothing is yet definitely known. Only about one eighth of the canals, said he, are seen to be double at the proper season, and they occur only in the equatorial, never in the polar regions. One of these doubles is 400 miles from side to side, and another is connected in curious way from the polar cap.
 The pictures used in illustration of the lecture showed the shrinking of the caps in summer and the gradual in- crease in the visibility of the canals. Among the stereopticon views were pho. tographs of the double canals as seen at the Lowell observatory during the