At length in 1886 Perrotin, at Nice, detected many of Schiaparelli's
canals, and later they were seen by others. In 1888 Schiaparelli greatly
extended his observations, and in 1892 and 1894 some of the canals were
studied with the 36-inch telescope of the Lick Observatory, and in the
last-named year a very elaborate series of observations upon them was
made by Percival Lowell and his associates, Prof. William C. Pickering
and Mr. A.E. Douglass, at Flagstaff, Arizona. Mr. Lowell's charts of the
planet are the most complete yet produced, containing 184 canals to
which separate names have been given, besides more than a hundred other
markings also designated by individual appellations.
It should not be inferred from the fact that Schiaparelli's discovery
in 1877 excited so much surprise and incredulity that no glimpse of the
peculiar canal-like markings on Mars had been obtained earlier than
that. At least as long ago as 1864 Mr. Dawes, in England, had seen and
sketched half a dozen of the larger canals, or at least the broader
parts of them, especially where they connect with the dark regions known
as seas, but Dawes did not see them in their full extent, did not
recognize their peculiar character, and entirely failed to catch sight
of the narrower and more numerous ones which constitute the wonderful
network discovered by the Italian astronomer. Schiaparelli found no less
than sixty canals during his first series of observations in 1877.
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