The main part of the land of Mars is situated in the Northern Hemisphere. It covers two-thirds of the entire globular surface. Rather than land, indeed, it should be called a network of land and water. The great continental block—so its orange tint declares it to be—is cut up in all possible directions by an intricate system of what appear to be waterways, running in perfectly straight lines—that is, along great circles of the globe—for distances varying from 350 to upward of 4,000 miles. They are frequently seen in duplicate, strictly parallel companions developing thirty to three hundred miles apart from the original formations. This mysterious phenomenon is evanescent, or rather periodical. The canals invariably connect two bodies of water; hence they need no locks or hydraulic machinery; their course is on a dead level. The broadest of them are comparable with the Adriatic; those at the limit of visibility, stretching like the finest spider-threads across the disk, have a width of eighteen miles. “The canals,” Schiaparelli says, “may intersect among themselves at all possible angles, but by preference they converge toward the small spots to which we have given the name of lakes. For example, seven are seen to converge in Lacus Phœnicis, eight in Trivium Charontis, six in Lunæ Lacus, and six in Ismenius Lacus.” These “lakes” evidently form an integral part of the canal system. They resemble huge railway junctions; and the largest of them—the “Eye of Mars” (Schiaparelli’s Lacus Solis)—seems, in Mr. Lowell’s phrase, like the hub of a five-spoked wheel. Mr. W. H. Pickering in 1892, and Mr. Percival Lowell in 1894, were amazed at their extraordinary abundance. “Scattered over the orange-ochre groundwork of the continental regions of the planet,” the latter wrote, “are any number of dark, round spots. How many there may be it is not possible to state, as the better the seeing, the more of them there seem to be. In spite, however, of their great number, there is no instance of one occurring unconnected with a canal. What is more, there is apparently none which does not lie at the junction of several canals. Reversely, all the junctions appear to be provided with spots.” Most of these foci are about 120 miles in diameter, and appear most precisely circular when most clearly seen. “Plotted upon a globe,” Mr. Lowell continues, “they and their connecting canals make a most curious network over all the orange-ochre equatorial parts of the planet, a mass of lines and knots, the one marking being as omnipresent as the other. Indeed, the spots are as peculiar and distinctive a feature of Mars as the canals themselves.” Like the canals, too, they emerge periodically, and in the same but a retarded succession. They “are, therefore, in the first place, seasonal phenomena, and, in the second place, phenomena that depend for their existence upon the prior existence of the canals.”