Part 12 (2/2)
I am not willing to hazard any conjecture as to the more extraordinary features of this narrative. I can very positively, however, affirm my complete confidence in Mr. Dodd's honesty. I knew both his father and himself very well, and through a long intimacy found them both consistently conforming to a very high type of character, courage, and intellectual integrity.
The MS. of Mr. Dodd was handed to me by himself, and I recall with a pathetic interest his smile of appreciative grat.i.tude as I received it, and gave him my earnest a.s.surance that it should be printed, and that the world would be made acquainted with his experiments and their results.
Mr. Dodd was the residuary legatee of his father, and his own will made during his last sickness, appointed me as his executor. My daughter was made his sole heir, with two exceptions; small amounts in favor of his a.s.sistants--Jeb Jobson and Andrew Clarke were mentioned in his will--and these sums have been paid by myself to each.
A series of extraordinary misfortunes, for which I am myself measurably to blame, resulted in the complete disappearance of the fortune inherited by my daughter. Her own death and that of my wife, following upon this disaster, though in no way connected with it, obliterated--and here again I admit a very grievous culpability--the remembrance of the MS. of Mr. Dodd and my own promises as to its publication.
I found the MS. of Mr. Dodd carefully wrapped up at the bottom of a trunk of papers, and confess that I opened the package it formed with a bitter sense of self-reproach. Mr. Dodd had expected to publish this paper in New York, and had requested that it should be forwarded to that city. I have at last complied with his wishes, and the MS. leaves my hands, absolutely unchanged, consigned through the kind intervention of a friend, to a publis.h.i.+ng house in that western metropolis. I am unable to add anything more to this statement, which, in itself, I fear conveys considerable censure to the undersigned.
August Bixby Dodan.
Note by the Editor.
The MS. alluded to by Mr. Dodan in the preceding paragraphs was safely brought to New York in 1900, and after a very careful examination, repeatedly rejected by the prominent publishers to whom it was submitted.
Through a peculiar accident connected with some negotiations pertaining to a scientific work, contemplated by the writer, the MS. came into his hands, and he has been encouraged to publish it, influenced by the favorable comments of friends upon its intrinsic interest. He also has added to the work as an appendix, which cannot fail to attract the attention of many, the views of the great astronomer Schiaparelli upon the present physical condition of Mars, being the reproduction of an article by that distinguished observer translated from _Nature et Arte_ for February, 1893, by Prof. William H. Pickering and published in the Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Inst.i.tution for 1894, published here by permission of ”Astronomy and Astro-Physics,”
in which journal it first appeared in Vol. XIII., numbers 8 and 9, for October and November, 1894. In this report also appeared Schiaparelli's Map of Mars in 1888, which the Editor has not reproduced in this connection.
The introduction to-day of the wireless telegraphy, a.s.suming a daily increasing importance, furnishes some reasonable hope that the marvellous statements given in Mr. Dodd's narrative may be more widely verified in the future, and point the way to a realization of the daring and thrilling conception of interplanetary communication.
THE PLANET MARS.
BY GIOVANNI SCHIAPARELLI.
THE PLANET MARS.
BY GIOVANNI SCHIAPARELLI.
Many of the first astronomers who studied Mars with the telescope had noted on the outline of its disk two brilliant white spots of rounded form and of variable size. In process of time it was observed that while the ordinary spots upon Mars were displaced rapidly in consequence of its daily rotation, changing in a few hours both their position and their perspective, the two white spots remained sensibly motionless at their posts. It was concluded rightly from this that they must occupy the poles of rotation of the planet, or at least must be found very near to them. Consequently they were given the name of polar caps or spots.
And not without reason is it conjectured that these represent upon Mars that immense ma.s.s of snow and ice which still to-day prevents navigators from reaching the poles of the earth. We are led to this conclusion not only by the a.n.a.logy of aspect and of place, but also by another important observation....
As things stand, it is manifest that if the above-mentioned white polar spots of Mars represent snow and ice they should continue to decrease in size with the approach of summer in those places and increase during the winter. Now this very fact is observed in the most evident manner. In the second half of the year 1892 the southern polar cap was in full view; during that interval, and especially in the months of July and August, its rapid diminution from week to week was very evident even to those observing with common telescopes. This snow (for we may well call it so), which in the beginning reached as far as lat.i.tude 70 degrees and formed a cap of over 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) in diameter, progressively diminished, so that two or three months later little more of it remained than an area of perhaps 300 kilometers (180 miles) at the most, and still less was seen in the last days of 1892. In these months the southern hemisphere of Mars had its summer, the summer solstice occurring upon October 13. Correspondingly the ma.s.s of snow surrounding the northern pole should have increased; but this fact was not observable, since that pole was situated in the hemisphere of Mars which was opposite to that facing the earth. The melting of the northern snow was seen in its turn in the years 1882, 1884 and 1886.
These observations of the alternate increase and decrease of the polar snows are easily made even with telescopes of moderate power, but they become much more interesting and instructive when we can follow a.s.siduously the changes in their more minute particulars, using larger instruments. The snowy regions are then seen to be successively notched at their edges; black holes and huge fissures are formed in their interiors; great isolated pieces many miles in extent stand out from the princ.i.p.al ma.s.s and, dissolving, disappear a little later. In short, the same divisions and movements of these icy fields present themselves to us at a glance that occur during the summer of our own arctic regions, according to the descriptions of explorers.
The southern snow, however, presents this peculiarity: The center of its irregularly rounded figure does not coincide exactly with the pole, but is situated at another point, which is nearly always the same, and is distant from the pole about 300 kilometers (180 miles) in the direction of the Mare Erythraeum. From this we conclude that when the area of the snow is reduced to its smallest extent the south pole of Mars is uncovered, and therefore, perhaps, the problem of reaching it upon this planet is easier than upon the earth. The southern snow is in the midst of a huge dark spot, which with its branches occupies nearly one-third of the whole surface of Mars, and is supposed to represent its princ.i.p.al ocean. Hence the a.n.a.logy with our arctic and antarctic snows may be said to be complete, and especially so with the antarctic one.
The ma.s.s of the northern snow cap of Mars is, on the other hand, centered almost exactly upon its pole. It is located in a region of yellow color, which we are accustomed to consider as representing the continent of the planet. From this arises a singular phenomenon which has no a.n.a.logy upon the earth. At the melting of the snows acc.u.mulated at that pole during the long night of ten months and more the liquid ma.s.s produced in that operation is diffused around the circ.u.mference of the snowy region, converting a large zone of surrounding land into a temporary sea and filling all the lower regions. This produces a gigantic inundation, which has led some observers to suppose the existence of another ocean in those parts, but which does not really exist in that place, at least as a permanent sea. We see then (the last opportunity was in 1884) the white spot of the snow surrounded by a dark zone, which follows its perimeter in its progressive diminution, upon a circ.u.mference ever more and more narrow. The outer part of this zone branches out into dark lines, which occupy all the surrounding region, and seem to be distributary ca.n.a.ls by which the liquid ma.s.s may return to its natural position. This produces in these regions very extensive lakes, such as that designated upon the map by the name of Lacus Hyperboreus; the neighboring interior sea called Mare Acidalium becomes more black and more conspicuous. And it is to be remembered as a very probable thing that the flowing of this melted snow is the cause which determines princ.i.p.ally the hydrographic state of the planet and the variations that are periodically observed in its aspect. Something similar would be seen upon the earth if one of our poles came to be located suddenly in the center of Asia or of Africa. As things stand at present, we may find a miniature image of these conditions in the flooding that is observed in our streams at the melting of the Alpine snows.
Travellers in the arctic regions have frequent occasion to observe how the state of the polar ice at the beginning of the summer, and even at the beginning of July, is always very unfavorable to their progress.
The best season for exploration is in the month of August, and September is the month in which the trouble from ice is the least. Thus in September our Alps are usually more practicable than at any other season. And the reason for it is clear--the melting of the snow requires time; a high temperature is not sufficient; it is necessary that it should continue, and its effect will be so much the greater, as it is the more prolonged. Thus, if we could slow down the course of our season so that each month should last sixty days instead of thirty, in the summer, in such a lengthened condition, the melting of the ice would progress much further, and perhaps it would not be an exaggeration to say that the polar cap at the end of the warm season would be entirely destroyed. But one cannot doubt, in such a case, that the fixed portion of such a cap would be reduced to a much smaller size, than we see it to-day. Now, this is exactly what happens to Mars. The long year, nearly double our own, permits the ice to acc.u.mulate during the polar night of ten or twelve months, so as to descend in the form of a continuous layer as far as parallel 70 degrees, or even farther. But in the day which follows, of twelve or ten months, the sun has time to melt all, or nearly all, of the snow of recent formation, reducing it to such a small area that it seems to us no more than a very white point. And perhaps this snow is entirely destroyed; but of this there is at present no satisfactory observation.
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