But the subject is by no means abandoned to the tellers of tales and the
dreamers of dreams. Men of science, also, eagerly enter into the
discussion of the possibilities of other worlds, and become warm over
it.
Around Mars, in particular, a lively war of opinions rages. Not all
astronomers have joined in the dispute--some have not imagination
enough, and some are waiting for more light before choosing sides--but
those who have entered the arena are divided between two opposed camps.
One side holds that Mars is not only a world capable of having
inhabitants, but that it actually has them, and that they have given
visual proof of their existence and their intelligence through the
changes they have produced upon its surface. The other side maintains
that Mars is neither inhabited nor habitable, and that what are taken
for vast public works and engineering marvels wrought by its
industrious inhabitants, are nothing but illusions of the telescope, or
delusions of the observer's mind. Both adduce numerous observations,
telescopic and spectroscopic, and many arguments, scientific and
theoretic, to support their respective contentions, but neither side has
yet been able to convince or silence the other, although both have made
themselves and their views intensely interesting to the world at large,
which would very much like to know what the truth really is.
And not only Mars, but Venus--the beauteous twin sister of the earth,
who, when she glows in the evening sky, makes everybody a lover of the
stars--and even Mercury, the Moor among the planets, wearing "the
shadowed livery of the burnished sun," to whom he is "a neighbor and
near bred," and Jupiter, Saturn, and the moon itself--all these have
their advocates, who refuse to believe that they are lifeless globes,
mere reflectors of useless sunshine.
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