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23 IN the last paper we saw how badly off for water Mars, to all appearance, is; so badly off that any inhabitants of that other world would have to irrigate to live. As to the actual presence there of such folk, the broad physical characteristics of the planet have nothing to say beyond a general expression of acquiescence, but they do have something very vital to say about the conditions under which alone their life could be led. They show that in these Martian minds there would be one question paramount to all the local labor, women's suffrage, and Eastern questions put together,--the water question. How to procure water enough to support life would be the great communal problem of the day. If Mars were the earth, we might well despair of detecting signs of any Martians for some time yet. Across the gulf of space that separates us from Mars, an area thirty miles wide would just be perceptible as a dot. It would, in such case, be hopeless to look for evidence of folk. Anything like London or New York, or even Chicago in anticipation, would be too small to be seen. So sorry a figure does man cut upon the earth he thinks to own. From the standpoint of forty millions of miles' distance, probably the only sign of his presence here would be such semi-artificialities as the great grain-fields of the West when their geometric patches turned with the changing seasons from ochre to green, and then from green to gold. By his crops we should know him,--a telltale fact of importance because probably the more so on Mars. of things, inorganic and organic, apparently a much more artificial one. If cultivation there be, it must be cultivation upon a much more systematic scale, due in large part to a system of irrigation; just as any Martians must be quite different physically from men. Now, at this point in our investigation, when the broad features of Mars disclose conditions which imply irrigation as their organic corollary, we are suddenly confronted on the planet's face with phenomena so startlingly suggestive of this very thing as to seem the uncanny realization of the deduction. Indeed, so amazingly lifelike is their appearance that, had we possessed our present knowledge of the planet's physical condition before, we might almost have predicted what we see as criterion of the presence of living beings. What confronts us is this:-- When the great continental areas, the reddish-ochre portions of the disc, are attentively examined in sufficiently steady air, their desert-like ground is seen to be traversed by a network of fine, straight dark lines. The lines start from points on the coast of the blue- green regions, commonly well-marked bays, and proceed direct to other equally well- marked points in the middle of the continent. At these latter termini the lines meet, very surprisingly, other lines that have come there from different starting-points in a similarly definite manner. And this state of things exists all over the reddish-ochre regions. All the lines, with the exception of a few that are curved in a regular manner, are absolutely straight from one end to the other. They are arcs of great circles, taking the shortest distance between their termini. The lines are as fine as they are straight. As a tule, they are of scarcely any perceptible breadth, seeming on the average to be less than a Martian degree, or between twenty and thirty miles, wide. Some are broader; some even For Mars is not the earth. Conditions hold there which would necessitate a different state