20. Colour-photography and Photographs of Mars
There were admirable photographs of wild birds and their nests, and of insects and plants in this exhibition. I saw the new Lumière coloured transparent photographs thrown by a lantern on the screen, and could distinguish the dots of red, green, and violet colour on what, at a little distance, appeared to be a brilliantly white part of the picture (the shirt collar of a “sitter”), just as one sees a mosaic of coloured dots in the blazing sunlight of the pictures painted by the French school of so-called “vibristes” (Monod and others). Perhaps the most remarkable of these photographs was a set of prints from untouched photographs of the planet Mars, executed in July 1907 by Professor Perceval Lowell at his observatory in Arizona.
The Mars photographs are each about as big as a dried pea (that is the biggest size possible with the feeble light reflected by Mars), but “several of the canals,” says Mr. Lowell, “are distinctly visible on the photographs, and one has been photographed double.” I should have liked to examine these photographs in a good light with a lens. The statement quoted means that the canals in Mars can no longer be regarded as due to errors of eyesight and imagination, and that the annual doubling or formation of a second canal parallel to what was earlier in the year a single canal, is actually recorded by a disinterested, impartial photographic plate. Are these canals the work of intelligent inhabitants of Mars? I will not venture to say in reply more than this, that I have never heard any other explanation of their occurrence. But that, of course, still leaves the matter open.