Mr. J. Orr, in the pages of the "British Astronomical Journal," assuming that Schiaparelli believed that the canals were excavated (despite the fact that Schiaparelli called them _canali_, or channels), and compared them to the English Channel and the Channel of Mozambique--for at the outset he had no doubt of their being natural configurations--proceeds to show the impossibility of an idea that was never entertained. His attempt is as childish and ridiculous as the theory he conjures up. Mr. Orr, taking it for granted that the only explanation offered for these lines is that they are excavated, concludes that a Martian canal, like Tartarus, "should be seventy feet in depth (one might ask, why not five hundred or five thousand?) and that the canals of Mars would contain 1,634,000 of our Suez Canals, and would require an army of two hundred million men, working for one thousand of our years, for their construction," and similar idiocies regarding the population of Mars, which he concludes "must be 409,000,000, thus showing that all the adult males, and a large number of women, must have been engaged in the great work." In connection with this absurd travesty, let us pause for a moment to consider the extraordinary character of the president of this society before which this paper was read. A man who is the senior assistant of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, instead of rebuking this balderdash as entirely beside the question, stated as the result of an experiment with a lot of charity-school children, that the canals are merely illusions of the brain, and this in the face of the testimony of a number of astronomers, many of whom are highly distinguished, that the markings do exist. This man seriously commented on the paper by saying: "He hoped that Mr. Orr's statistical, but nevertheless amusing and instructive, paper might prove one more nail in the coffin of a very absurd idea which had certainly got most undue currency, namely, that the canals of Mars could possibly be the work of human agents." Equally astounding, too, is it that this nonsense the "Astronomical Journal of the Pacific" republishes without a word of comment. But what could we expect of the mentality of the senior assistant of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, who, with the great vault of heaven crowded with enigmas awaiting an answer, should waste a particle of gray matter in trying to ascertain precisely where Joshua stood when he commanded the Sun to stand still so that he could have a little more time for his bloody work. Even the day of the month is ascertained; he finds that the date of this murderous affair was about July 22, and that the Sun must have risen exactly at 5 A. M. and set at 7 P. M. The Moon, he concludes, must have been about its third quarter and was within half an hour of setting. He could not fix the year, however! Fancy all this detail without a word of exegetical criticism, or comment on the precise words of Joshua.