the presence of highly intelligent beings who have designed and constructed them.  This idea has coloured or governed all his writings on the subject.  The innumerable difficulties which it raises have been either ignored, or brushed aside on the flimsiest evidence.  As examples, he never even discusses the totally inadequate water-supply for such worldwide irrigation, or the extreme irrationality of constructing so vast a canal-system the waste from which, by evaporation, when exposed to such desert conditions as he himself describes, would use up ten times the probable supply.

Again, he urges the ‘purpose’ displayed in these ‘canals.’  Their being all so straight, all describing great circles of the ‘sphere,’ all being so evidently arranged (as he thinks) either to carry water to some ‘oasis’ 2000 miles away, or to reach some arid region far over the equator in the opposite hemisphere!  But he never considers the difficulties this implies.  Everywhere these canals run for thousands of miles across waterless deserts, forming a system and indicating a purpose, the wonderful perfection of which he is never tired of dwelling upon (but which I myself can nowhere perceive).

Yet he never even attempts to explain how the Martians could have lived before this great system was planned and executed, or why they did not first utilise and render fertile the belt of land adjacent to the limits of the polar snows—­why the method of irrigation did not, as with all human arts, begin gradually, at home, with terraces and channels to irrigate the land close to the source of the water.  How, with such a desert as he describes three-fourths of Mars to be, did the inhabitants ever get to know anything of the equatorial regions and its needs, so as to start right away to supply those needs?  All this, to my mind, is quite opposed to the idea of their being works of art, and altogether in favour of their being natural features of a globe as peculiar in origin and internal structure as it is in its surface-features.  The explanation I have given, though of course hypothetical, is founded on known cosmical and terrestrial facts, and is, I suggest, far more scientific as well as more satisfactory than Mr. Lowell’s wholly unsupported speculation.  This view I have explained in some detail in the preceding chapter.

Mr. Lowell never even refers to the important question of loss by evaporation in these enormous open canals, or considers the undoubted fact that the only intelligent and practical way to convey a limited quantity of water such great distances would be by a system of water-tight and air-tight tubes laid under the ground. The mere attempt to use open canals for such a purpose shows complete ignorance and stupidity in these alleged very superior beings; while it is certain that, long before half of them were completed their failure to be of any use would have led any rational beings to cease constructing them.