Percival Lowell - Mars as the abode of life (1908)

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In the great desert of northern Arizona the traveller, threading his way across a sage-brush and cacti plain shut in by abrupt-sided shelves of land rising here and there some hundreds of feet higher, suddenly comes upon a petrified forest.

Percival Lowell

So far as thought may peer into the past, the epic of our solar system began with a great catastrophe. Two suns met. What had been, ceased; what was to be, arose. Fatal to both progenitors, the event dated a stupendous cosmic birth.

Percival Lowell

There are celestial sights more dazzling, spectacles that inspire more awe, but to the thoughtful observer who is privileged to see them well, there is nothing in the sky so profoundly impressive as the canals of Mars. Fine lines and little gossamer filaments only, cobwebbing the face of the Martian disk, but threads to draw one's mind after them across the millions of miles of intervening void.

Percival Lowell

For animals and plants, too perishable to endure, have left their stamp behind, and even footprints of past reptiles confront us, legible still on the hardened sands of time, as if made yesterday in the spots they traversed hundreds of centuries ago.

Percival Lowell