The Trivium Charontis is situated just beyond the right-hand margin of our map.  It is a triangular dark area, the sides about 200 miles long, and it is shown on the chart as being the centre from which radiate thirteen canals.  Another centre is Aquae Calidae situated at the point of a dark area running obliquely from 55 deg. to 35 deg.  N. latitude, and, as shown on a map of the opposite hemisphere to our map, has nearly twenty canals radiating from it in almost every direction.  Here at all events there seems to be no special connection with the polar snow-caps, and the radiating lines seem to have no intelligent purpose whatever, but are such as might result from fractures in a glass globe produced by firing at it with very small shots one at a time.  Taking the whole series of them, Mr. Lowell very justly compares them to “a network which triangulates the surface of the planet like a geodetic survey, into polygons of all shapes and sizes.”

At the very lowest estimate the total length of the canals observed and mapped by Mr. Lowell must be over a hundred thousand miles, while he assures us that numbers of others have been seen over the whole surface, but so faintly or on such rare occasions as to elude all attempts to fix their position with certainty.  But these, being of the same character and evidently forming part of the same system, must also be artificial, and thus we are led to a system of irrigation of almost unimaginable magnitude on a planet which has no mountains, no rivers, and no rain to support it; whose whole water-supply is derived from polar snows, the amount of which is ludicrously inadequate to need any such world-wide system; while the low atmospheric pressure would lead to rapid evaporation, thus greatly diminishing the small amount of moisture that is available.  Everyone must, I think, agree with Miss Clerke, that, even admitting the assumption that the polar snows consist of frozen water, the excessively scanty amount of water thus obtained would render any scheme of world-wide distribution of it hopelessly unworkable.

The very remarkable phenomena of the duplication of many of the lines, together with the darkspots—­the so-called oases—­at their intersections, are doubtless all connected in some unknown way with the constitution and past history of the planet; but, on the theory of the whole being works of art, they certainly do not help to remove any of the difficulties which have been shown to attend the theory that the single lines represent artificial canals of irrigation with a strip of verdure on each side of them produced by their overflow.

Lowell on the Purpose of the Canals.

Before leaving this subject it will be well to quote Mr. Lowell’s own words as to the supposed perfectly level surface of Mars, and his interpretation of the origin and purpose of the ‘canals’: