Canals on Mars by Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Mar 8, 1910

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 37, No. 10.

Canals on Mars

By Editor

This journal has from time to time during years past given the opinion of some of the best astronomers that there was no such thing as canals on Mars or any artificial waterways whatsoever; and yet we see every once in a while in the sensational daily press some marvelous article about the canals on Mars, and the new canals even that are being dug, and we are told with wonderful detail how Mars could be signaled by the people of the earth and so inter-planetary communication set up. This of course is all nonsense to the best astronomers.

Mr. Antoniadi, at the special request of the Astro-Physical Observatory of Paris, has just completed a study of the planet Mars with the great equatorial telescope at Meudon, the most powerful in the Old World. We gather this from the "Literary Digest" of February 12; and he declares under good seeing, in observations which have been kept up for months, there was no trace of a geometrical network of canals. And he refers to what Professor Frost of the Yerkes Observatory declares, that the great telescope of the Chicago University was "too powerful for canals." Professor Barnard is also quoted that in using the large telescopes of Lick and Yerkes he never saw any spider's webs on the planet. We are told however that Mr. Schiaparelli, who first suggested the idea of canals, had a much inferior telescope, and that the dark spots on Mars in unsatisfactory definition seem to be lines and streaks. And the conclusion of Mr. Antoniadi is as follows:

"The impossibility of the Martian canal network was demonstrated theoretically by Mr. Maunder, of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich; by Dr. Cerulli, president of the Societa Astronomica Italiana; and by the great American astronomer, the late Professor Newcomb. The results of 1909 now establish that the would-be existence of artificial canals on Mars is further disproved by the otherwise weighty evidence of observation."

Parallel to the Martian are the many other theories of scientists which seek to set aside the Word of God.