From: albonnici_at_vol.net.mt
Date: Wed Jul 30 2003 - 15:44:31 PDT
Dear Larry,
Thanks a billion for your kind help. I obtained the photograph in question from a friend of mine (Dr. Alex Gatt) here in Malta who will also be taking part in the public lecture series we are organising for the third and fourth weeks of August.
I have an HTML format copy (courtesy of www.blackmask.com) of Lowell’s book Mars, but, thanks for the online version you directed me to. The drawings will provide good illustrative material for my lectures.
Another great book I found on the Internet is “Is Mars Habitable?” by Alfred Russel Wallace http://www.wku.edu/%7Esmithch/wallace/S730.htm. In fact most of Wallace’s works are available on line at http://www.wku.edu/%7Esmithch/index1.htm. Another good book is “La vita sul pianeta Marte (Life On Planet Mars)” by Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli. A very interesting work in Italian. This work can be obtained via Blackmask.Com at http://www.blackmask.com/books123c/martedex.htm and downloaded in several e-text formats via this link: http://www.blackmask.com/page.php?do=page&cat_id=440&nh=3&mh=25 this book is found under the EUROPA category. In the Science category you will find both Wallace’s and Lowell’s books cited above. Wallace’s book is a critique of Lowell’s other Mars book “Mars and its Canals”.
I came also across the following online article from “Sky and Telescope” entitled” Venus Spokes: An Explanation at Last?” by William Sheehan. It appears old Percival was seeing linear features on Venus as well.
Besides the 19th century myths and misconceptions connected to the search for life in Mars I will also cover the controversy surrounding the Face in Cydonia and other structures which are part of the mythology of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Thank you once again Larry,
Yours truly,
Alex
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>Hi Alex,
>
>Can you get a copy of Lowell and Mars, by William Graves Hoyt, Universit=
>y of =20
>Arizona Press, Tucson, 1976 (reprinted 1996):
>http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/books/bid691.htm
>The images you seek are on pages 192-193. Regarding the canals, if there
>are any depicted in those 20 images they display, then they must be prett=
>y
>small. I highly recommend this book. =20
>
>Lowell's first book on Mars, published in 1895, is available online here:
>
>http://www.wanderer.org/references/lowell/Mars/
>
>It has plenty of his drawings of the Red Planet as he saw it in 1894.
>
>Larry
>
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: Alex Michael Bonnici
>Sent: Tuesday, July 29, 2003 10:18 PM
>To: setipublic; Project Orion
>Subject: SETI public: A Question Concerning Lowell's Alleged 1907 Photogr=
>aphs of the Martian Canals
>
>Hello Gang,
> Currently I am involved in a series of public education
>activities that will be organised in late August in connection to the
>upcoming Mars Opposition. I will be giving the first of a series of
>public lectures concerning Mars. The first lecture is entitled =E2=80=9CL=
>owell
>and the Martian Canal Saga=E2=80=9D. This has always been a favourite top=
>ic of
>mine. When I was teaching High School Physics and Astronomy in the
>United States I repeated astronomer Edward Walter Maunder=E2=80=99s exper=
>iment
>=E2=80=9CSchool Boy=E2=80=9D experiment and got some interesting results =
>that the
>Martian canals were an optical illusion.
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