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After all, we speak in a similar way of the seas of the Moon, knowing very well that they do not consist of liquid masses.” 5 Elsewhere, he continued: “[W]e are inclined to believe them to be produced by an evolution of the planet, just as on the Earth we have the English Channel and the Channel of Mozambique.” 6
    However, Schiaparelli himself confused the issue, perhaps cautiously bowing to popular enthusiasm: “Their singular aspect, and their being drawn with absolute geometrical precision, as if they were the work of rule or compass, has led some to see in them the work of intelligent beings…. I am very careful not to combat this supposition, which includes nothing impossible.” 7
    His maps were of sufficient quality that they were used well into the twentieth century, almost to the dawn of the space age. But the canali were the overriding feature to most. In the popular mind, and in at least one eccentric American astronomer's, the word canali had a specific connotation, and intelligence was indelibly ascribed to his observed features regardless of his ambivalence to the idea. This notion quickly caught fire in the public mind.
    It should be noted that there was ample opposition to this idea in scientific circles. In 1894, American astronomer William Wallace Campbell (later to become the president of the University of California) performed spectroscopic analyses of the Martian atmosphere and noted little, if any, water or oxygen present. This should have crushed the dreams of many who envisioned advanced civilizations and vast oceans on Mars, or even water-consuming plant life, but this is not the way of the fertile and wishful mind. The idea of sentient Martians persisted, and grew.

    The aristocratic American amateur astronomer Percival Lowell (1855-1916) was intrigued by a book Flammarion wrote about Mars (La planète Mars , 1892), and was further awed by Schiaparelli's work. In particular, Lowell seems to have fallen prey (as so many did) to the Italian astronomer's unfortunate choice of the word canali to describe the lines he thought he saw on the planet, thinking (or hoping) that this implied intelligent, intentional design. In short, Lowell and others interpreted this term, either consciously or not, as denoting artificial canals, built by intelligent Martians to save their water-starved world. In fact, Lowell went so far as to suggest a utopian, united Martian global government, for how else could they achieve these world-girdling civil-engineering projects?
    Lowell was perhaps the most fascinating of the “intelligent Martian” club. Born of a wealthy Boston family, his passions were few but remarkably powerful throughout his life. After his formal education, which resulted in graduation from Harvard in mathematics, he spent many years in Asia, specifically in Japan, about which he wrote influentially and with characteristic intensity. This literary training would serve him well when he later sought to popularize his theories about Mars, which in their own way did more to popularize planetary science (no matter how ultimately misguided his own ideas may have been) with his populist, if fantastic, theories.
    In 1894, with a few years of work on Mars already under his belt, Lowell traveled to the Arizona territory and chose a mountaintop just outside of Flagstaff to build his observatory. With a family fortune in textiles at his disposal, he built one of the finerAmerican observatories of its time atop the perch he renamed Mars Hill. It should be noted that, within academia and “professional” circles, Lowell (regardless of that Ivy League degree in mathematics), was considered by many an amateur astronomer, despite rigorous self-training and his fine observatory. Nonetheless, for the next fifteen years he made careful and detailed studies of Mars through his large telescope, resulting in thousands of drawings and three books: Mars (1895), Mars and Its Canals (1906), and Mars as the Abode of Life