Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: MARS AND ITS CANALS CHAPTER I ON EXPLORATION ROM time immemorial travel and discovery have called with strange insistence to him who, wondering on the world, felt adventure in his veins. The leaving familiar sights and faces to push forth into the unknown has with magnetic force drawn the bold to great endeavor and fired the thought of those who stayed at home. Spur to enterprise since man first was, this spirit has urged him over the habitable globe. Linked in part to mere matter of support it led the more daring of the Aryans to quit the shade of their beech trees, reposeful as that umbrage may have been, and wander into Central Asia, so to perplex philologists into believing them to have originated there; it lured Columbus across the waste of waters and caused his son to have carved upon his tomb that ringing couplet of which the simple grandeur still stirs the blood: — A Oastilla Y A Leon Xukvo Moxdo nio Colon; (To Castile and Leon beyond the wave Another world Columbus gave;) it drove the early voyagers into the heart of the vast wilderness, there to endure all hardship so that they might come where their kind had never stood before; and now it points man to the pole. Something of the selfsame spirit finds a farther field today outside the confines of our traversable earth. Science which has caused the world to shrink and dwindle has been no less busy bringing near what in the past seemed inaccessibly remote. Beyond our earth man's penetration has found it possible to pierce, and in its widening circle of research has latterly been made aware of another world of strange enticement across the depths of space. Planetary distances, not mundane ones, are here concerned, and the globe to be explored, though akin to, is yet very different from, our own. This ...