Is Mars Habitable A Critical Examination Of Professor Percival Lowell S Book Mars And Its Canals With An Alternative Explanation

This early work by Alfred Russel Wallace was originally published in 1907 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. 'Is Mars Habitable?' is an essay on the possibilities of organic life surviving on the red planet. Alfred Russel Wallace was born on 8th January 1823 in the village of Llanbadoc, in Monmouthshire, Wales. Wallace was inspired by the travelling naturalists of the day and decided to begin his exploration career collecting specimens in the Amazon rainforest. He explored the Rio Negra for four years, making notes on the peoples and languages he encountered as well as the geography, flora, and fauna. While travelling, Wallace refined his thoughts about evolution and in 1858 he outlined his theory of natural selection in an article he sent to Charles Darwin. Wallace made a huge contribution to the natural sciences and he will continue to be remembered as one of the key figures in the development of evolutionary theory.

"Few persons except astronomers fully realise that of all the planets of the Solar system the only one whose solid surface has been seen with certainty is Mars." In 1907, Alfred Russel Wallace wrote the short book "Is Mars Habitable?" in response to Professor Percival Lowell's book "Mars and its Canals." The latter seemed to invalidated the claims Wallace made in his 1902 book "Man's Place in the Universe," in which he came to the conclusion that Mars was not habitable. In order to write this new volume, he embarked on months of research, interviewed experts, and scrupulously studied the martian climate and atmospheric conditions. Wallace points out that there are no signs of water vapour in Mars’ atmosphere, and that Lowell’s analysis of its climate was seriously flawed in several other aspects, which he discusses in detail here. Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) was British naturalist, biologist, anthropologist, geographer and explorer. He was the first researcher to seriously try to gauge the likelihood of life on other planets, which he discussed in his 1902 "Man's Place in the Universe."

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Excerpt from Is Mars Habitable? A Critical Examination of Professor Percival Lowell's Book, Mars and Its Canals: With an Alternative Explanation This small volume was commenced as a review article on Professor Percival Lowell's book, Mars and its Canals, with the object of showing that the large amount of new and interesting facts contained in this work did not invalidate the con elusion I had reached in 1902, and stated in my book on Man's Place in the? Universe, that Mars was not habitable. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.