her's
passionate hope to learn something of his wife's life after death we
reached Christ Church, New Zealand, in June, 1883.

I may now revert to the line of suggestions that led my father and
myself to locate in Mars the scene, at least, as we surmised in part, of
those phases of a future life which I am now able to reveal with, I
think, positive certainty.

The planet Mars as being the next orb removed from the Sun after our own
world in the advance outward from our solar center, has always attracted
attention. At perihelion, when in opposition with the earth, it is 35
millions of miles from the earth, and its surface, as is well known from
the drawings of Kaiser, the Leyden astronomer, and of Schiaparelli,
Denning, Perrotin and Terby, has apparently revealed an alternation of
land and water which, with the assumption of meteorological conditions,
such as prevail on the earth, has gradually made it easy to think of its
occupation by rational beings as altogether possible.

During the opposition of Mars in 1879-80, Prof. Schiaparelli at Milan
determined for the second time the topography of this planet. The
topography revealed the curious long lines or ribbons, commonly called
canals, which seamed the face of our neighboring planet. In 1882 this
observation was enormously extended. He then showed that there was a
variable brightness in some regions, that there had been a progressive
enlargement since 1879 of his _Syrtis Magna_, that the oblique white
streaks previously seen, continued, and, more remarkable, that there was
a continuous development day after day of the doubling of the canals
which seemed to extend along great circles of the sphere. In 1882
Schiaparelli expected at the evening opposition in 1884 to confirm and
add to these observations.

My father had read Schiaparelli's announcements with absorbed interest.
They fed his burning fancies as to the extension of our present life,
and offered him a sort of scientific basis (without which he was
inclined to view all eschatology as superficial) for the belief that we
may attain in some other planet an actual prolonged second existence.

His great reverence for Sir William Herschell was indisputable. He
quoted Herschell's own words with appreciation. These pregnant sentences
were as follows:

"The analogy between Mars and the earth is perhaps by far the greatest
in the whole solar system. Their diurnal motion is nearly the same, the
obliquity of their re