who fueled speculation that there were canals on Mars
, founded the Lowell Observatory
in Flagstaff
, Arizona
, and formed the beginning of the effort that led to the discovery of Pluto
14 years after his death. The choice of the name Pluto and its symbol were partly influenced by his initials PL.
Percival Lowell was a descendant of the Boston
Lowell family
.
The whole object of science is to synthesize, and so simplify; and did we but know the uttermost of a subject we could make it singularly clear.
Formulae are the anaesthetics of thought, not its stimulants and to make any one think is far better worth while than cramming him with ill-considered, and therefore indigestible, learning.
That Mars is inhabited by beings of some sort or other we may consider as certain as it is uncertain what these beings may be.
War is a survival among us from savage times and affects now chiefly the the boyish and unthinking element of the nation.
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.
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.