This chapter may be ended by a brief application of some of these considerations to the case of the planet Mars. Next to the Moon Mars is our nearest neighbour, and the erection of great telescopes in America, one of them at Flagstaff Observatory, Arizona, where the air is extraordinarily clear and telescopic vision unusually penetrating, has stimulated the observation of the planet to a very great degree during recent years. Mars has an atmosphere not nearly so dense as that of the earth, but still dense enough in all probability to support some form of organic life. It may, for example, support vegetation. In some other respects Mars resembles the earth. It has arctic circles; it has clouds, though whether these are of vapour or of dust is not quite certain; and it has a less variable temperature by far than that of the Moon. There are, at any rate, some of the conditions to support and perhaps to encourage life; and if we could be certain that the atmosphere in Mars more nearly resembles that of the earth, and that its temperature was such as to be sometimes above that of our Arctic regions, then it would be difficult to deny that life, and probably intelligent beings, existed there. One very able and intelligent astronomer is convinced that life and intelligent beings do exist there. This is Professor Lowell, of Flagstaff Observatory, who has devoted a number of years and a great deal of money to the careful observation of the planet. He has brought forward many cogent arguments to show that Mars might be inhabited, and that great telescopes can discover signs on it, and may discover further signs, which are a reason for supposing it to be so. It is not, however, within the range of this book to examine these reasons in detail; and we need only say that in the first decade of the twentieth century most astronomers, despite the close examination of Mars and its markings, which had been conducted for more than a generation, were still not convinced that life as we know it could exist there.
After the time when the great overflows of lava took place, spreading over continents and sometimes seas, there was an era when the explosions and outbursts began to diminish in violence, and the world slowly settled down to conditions something like those which we see in our own day. The seas were forming; there was rainfall and summer and winter on the earth. The rains and the winds, the summer heats and winter snows were more violent than now, and the volcanic activity of which we have spoken was much more fierce than anything of which mankind has any recollection. In the British Isles the rainfall in a year averages something in the neighbourhood of thirty inches. In some regions of the earth it is as much as four times that amount, and deluges of fifteen inches have fallen in a day. But in the era of which we have spoken deluging rains that were to be measured in feet rather than inches fell incessantly. The air was saturated with moisture, and it no sooner descended on the warm earth than it steamed back to the clouds again. For reasons not unlike these, nor unconnected with them, the great currents of air fed by the constant transference of vapour from the earth to the skies, and the condensation of the vapour to rain, falling again on the earth, were greatly magnified. Thus the rocks of the earth, some of them only cooling and not yet hardened, were subjected to "weathering" of a kind of which it is hard to form any sufficient idea. The key to all geology is that what is going on now on the earth is similar to what always has been happening, (differing in degree rather than in kind), and that consequently the rocks of millions of years ago were washed by rivers down to the lower levels and were deposited as sediment in streams, in lakes, and in the sea. Thus the age of the "sedimentary rocks" began while the earth was still too warm to preserve any vestiges of life.