[Illustration: Autograph]
[Illustration: ·The M·M Co· Logo]
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO · DALLAS · ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO
MACMILLAN & CO., Limited
LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA · MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA, Limited
TORONTO
[Illustration: PERCIVAL LOWELL AGE 61
From a silver point portrait begun before his death and finished
afterwards by Eccolo Cartollo]
BIOGRAPHY OF
PERCIVAL LOWELL
_By_
A. LAWRENCE LOWELL
NEW YORK
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1935
_Copyright, 1935, by_
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
All rights reserved—no part of this book may be reproduced in any form
without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer
who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written
for inclusion in magazine or newspaper.
_Set up and printed._
_Published November, 1935._
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
NORWOOD PRESS LINOTYPE, INC.
NORWOOD, MASS., U.S.A.
PREFACE
If genius is the capacity for taking infinite pains, Percival Lowell
possessed it abundantly from his study of Esoteric Shinto, in his
earlier life in Japan, to his great calculation of the position and
orbit of an unknown planet beyond Neptune, at the close of his life. In
determining facts he was thoroughly and rigidly scientific, leaving
nothing unexplored that bore upon the subject; and in his astronomical
investigations it became clear to him that better methods of doing it
were required. At the outset, therefore, he set up his Observatory in an
atmosphere steadier than that where the older telescopes, and almost all
of those then in existence, did their work; thus seeing much not visible
elsewhere.
But in addition to industry he had an inflammable intellect, easily
ignited by any suggestion or observation, and when alight glowing in
intensity until the work was done. He had also a highly vivid
imagination, compared with many men of science who proceeded more
cautiously; and hence he sought, not only to ascertain new facts, but to
draw conclusions from them more freely than is customary with experts of
that type. This he felt had often been true of those who made advances
in scientific thought, and he regarded himself as standing for a time
somewhat apart from most men in his own field. Such an attitude, and the
fact that he had taken up observational astronomy in middle life,
unconnected with any other scientific institution, tended to make many
professional astronomers look upon him askance. So he plowed his own
furrow largely by himself in the spirit of a pioneer, and this little
volume is an attempt to tell what he accomplished.
The writer is very grateful to the Houghton, Mifflin Company, the
Macmillan Company, The Atlantic Monthly, Rhodora, the Scientific
American, and Miss Katharine G. Macartney (on behalf of Mrs. George
Gould) for permission to quote, sometimes at great length, from books
and articles by and about Percival. The writer desires also to express
his deep obligation to Mr. George R. Agassiz, his brother’s intimate
friend and helper, to Dr. Vesto Melvin Slipher, Dr. Carl O. Lampland and
Mr. E. C. Slipher of the Lowell Observatory at Flagstaff, for reading
the manuscript and giving advice; and to Professor Henry Norris Russell
of Princeton University, for his kindness in not only doing this, but
for writing the two appendices that follow this volume. Without their
help the astronomical part of this book would have been sadly defective.
They have pointed out advances in knowledge that have made certain of
Percival’s opinions, particularly earlier ones, no longer tenable. Some
of these he changed during his lifetime, others he would have changed
had he lived to see the more ample facts since known. Nor is this a
criticism of his work, for astronomy has been advancing rapidly of late;
and when that is true no man can expect all his views, even if accepted
at the time, to endure. Change in opinions is the penalty of growing
knowledge. It is enough that a man has helped to push knowledge and
thought forward while he lived, and this Percival, with the exhaustless
energy of his nature, certainly did.
Boston, October 21, 1935.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I Childhood and Youth 1
II First Visit to Japan 8
III Korea 13
IV His First Book, “Chosön” 17
V The Coup d’Etat and the Japanese March to the Sea 20
VI The Soul of the Far East 29
VII Second Visit to Japan 41
VIII Japan Again—the Shinto Trances 52
IX The Observatory at Flagstaff 61
X Mars 76
XI The Permanent Observatory—Interludes and Travels 92
XII Illness and Eclipse 98
XIII Mars and Its Canals 107
XIV The Solar System 120
XV Later Evolution of the Planets 136
XVI Interludes 145
XVII The Effect of Commensurate Periods 157
XVIII The Origin of the Planets 168
XIX The Search for a Trans-Neptunian Planet 176
XX Pluto Found 195
Appendix I Professor Russell’s Later Views on the Size of Pluto 203
Appendix II The Lowell Observatory by Professor Russell 206
ILLUSTRATIONS
Percival Lowell, Age 61 _Frontispiece_
Percival Lowell and His Biographer Facing Page 4
Percival Lowell and the Members of the Korean Embassy 16
Observing and Drawing the Canals of Mars 116
Gaps in the Asteroids and the Rings of Saturn 166
Predicted and Actual Orbits of Pluto Page 199
BIOGRAPHY OF
PERCIVAL LOWELL
CHAPTER I
CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH
The particular assortment of qualities a man inherits, from among the
miscellaneous lot his ancestors no doubt possessed and might have
transmitted, is of primary importance to him. In this Percival Lowell
was fortunate. From his father’s family he derived a very quick
apprehension, a capacity for intellectual interests, keen and
diversified, and a tireless joy in hard mental labor; while from his
mother’s people he drew sociability, ease of companionship and charm;
from both families a scorn of anything mean or unworthy, a business
ability and the physical health that comes from right living. His life
is the story of the use he made of these heirlooms.
The son of Augustus Lowell and Katharine Bigelow (Lawrence), Percival
Lowell was born in Boston on March 13, 1855, at 131 Tremont Street where
the Shepard stores now stand. The region was then residential, and his
parents went there so that his mother might be near her father, the Hon.
Abbott Lawrence, whose house was on Park Street, now the main portion of
the Union Club. He had fallen ill since his return as Minister to
England, and was now failing fast. Percival was her first-born, but
others followed rapidly, involving removal to larger quarters; first to
Park Square, and then to 81 Mount Vernon Street, where even the games of
little boys were tinged by the overshadowing events of the day,—the
drilling and the battles of the Civil War. He went to a dame school kept
by Miss Fette; and being always a good scholar learned what he should;
for he developed normally. After infancy the summer was spent at Beverly
in the pleasures and occupations of early childhood.
But in the spring of 1864 there came a sudden change. His mother was far
from well, and losing ground so fast that his father was advised to take
her abroad for a complete change as her only chance,—a heroic remedy
which proved in time successful. So the family sailed in the _Africa_, a
paddle-wheel steamer of 2500 tons with the sails of a full-rigged
ship,—the father with an invalid wife, four children aged from nine to
two, a nurse sea-sick all the time; and in addition the care of three
more children of a friend in Europe, with a nurse who was well, but
bereft of sense. However, they arrived safely, spent the summer in
England, and, as all Americans did in those days, went to Paris for the
winter.
Here Percival began a life different from that of his contemporaries at
home; for with his younger brother and his cousin, George P.
Gardner,—one of the children who had crossed with him on the _Africa_—he
went to a French boarding school kept by a Mr. Kornemann. We were
allowed to come home for Sundays, but spent the rest of the week at the
school,—a very wise arrangement; for, although there were some English
boys, the atmosphere was French, and we learned the language easily, by
the native method of teaching it. To Percival this was a great benefit
throughout his life.
Two winters were spent in this way, the intervening summer being passed
by the family in travel. In the spring of 1866 his parents proposed to
go for a few weeks to Italy, and take the children with them; but
Percival was so ill at ease in travel that he was left at the famous
boarding school kept by the Silligs at Vevey. Although in mature life a
constant traveller, this event was not out of character, for not being
yet old enough to enjoy the results of travel, or feel the keen interest
in them later aroused, he was too restless to find pleasure in long
journeying without an object. On their return from Italy the family
picked him up and went to Germany, where they were caught by the seven
weeks’ war with Austria. When it broke out they were at Schwalbach in
Nassau, one of the smaller states that took sides against Prussia.
Percival always remembered vividly what he there saw, exciting enough
for a small boy; the sudden clatter of a galloping horse, as a man in
civilian dress passed the hotel up a small lane to the left. It was the
burgomaster carrying word of Prussian advance, followed quickly by the
sound of several more horses, and three videttes in blue galloped past,
turning up the main road in front of the hotel where they supposed the
burgomaster had gone. Up the road they went and disappeared round a turn
to the left at the top of the slope. Scarcely had they vanished when a
squad of green-clad Nassau infantry appeared, and following half-way up
the hill hid behind a wood pile. It was not long before the Prussian
videttes, having failed to find the burgomaster, came into sight again,
leisurely walking their horses down the road. When abreast of the wood
pile the Nassau squad stole out, firing from the hip in the manner of
the day. Whether they hit anyone we never knew, but the enemy was wholly
dispersed, for one of the horsemen wheeled up the hill, another spurred
his horse down past the hotel, and the third jumped his over the wall
into the garden of the baths. That afternoon a Nassau regiment marched
into the town and bivouacked in the streets, leaving in the morning to
be replaced later in the day by a Prussian regiment, which in its turn
marched off to its rendezvous near Kissingen.
By the end of the summer of 1866 Mother was well enough to go home, and
the whole family sailed for Boston. Percival’s education there was of
the ordinary classical type preparatory for college, for one year at a
school kept by a Mr. Fette, brother of his teacher in childhood, and
then for five years in that of Mr. George W. C. Noble, whose influence,
both by teaching and character, was strong with all boys capable of
profiting thereby. Percival was always near the top of his class,
especially in the Classics, which he acquired so easily that while
playing with a toy boat, in a shallow pond made by the melting snow on
the lawn at Brookline, it occurred to him to describe an imaginary
shipwreck thereof; and he did so in some hundreds of Latin hexameter
verses.
[Illustration: PERCIVAL LOWELL
And His Biographer]
In the spring of 1867 Father bought the place at the corner of Heath and
Warren Streets in Brookline, where he lived until his death in 1900; and
where his last child, Amy, passed her whole life. Here Percival spent
his boyhood, summer and winter, until he went to college, enjoying the
life and sports of the seasons; and, in fact, he was a normal boy like
his comrades, only more so. During the earlier years Father drove us
into town and out again each day, he going to his office and the
children to school. On the road he talked on all subjects and we learned
much in this way. Somehow he made us feel that every self-respecting man
must work at something that is worth while, and do it very hard. In our
case it need not be remunerative, for he had enough to provide for that;
but it must be of real significance. I do not know that he ever said
this formally, but, by the tenor of his conversation and his own
attitude toward life, he impressed that conviction deeply upon the
spirit. From his own active and ambitious nature, Percival little
required such a stimulus; and, indeed, he struck out an intellectual
path of his own in boyhood. He took to astronomy, read many books
thereon, had a telescope of his own, of about two and a quarter inches
in diameter, with which he observed the stars from the flat roof of our
house; and later in life he recalled that with it he had seen the white
snow cap on the pole of Mars crowning a globe spread with blue-green
patches on an orange ground. This interest he never lost, and after
lying half-dormant for many years it blazed forth again as the dominant
one in his life, and the field of his remarkable achievements.
The two years of school in Paris certainly had not retarded his
progress, if, indeed, the better European discipline had not advanced
it; for he could have been prepared for college at sixteen, but it was
thought well to extend the time another year and fill in with other
things. Strangely enough, Mr. Noble thought him not so strong as he
might be in two subjects where he later excelled,—English Composition
and Mathematics,—and in these he was tutored the year before entering
college. Later he thought he had been misjudged, but one may suspect it
was rather because his interest in these matters had not been aroused.
The capacity was there but not yet awakened. However, he entered college
in the autumn of 1872 not only clear but with honors in Mathematics. In
fact he studied that subject every year in college, took second-year
honors in it, and Professor Benjamin Peirce, the great mathematician,
spoke of him as one of the most brilliant scholars ever under his
observation, hinting to him that if he would devote himself thereto he
could succeed him in his chair. Yet it was by no means his sole field of
knowledge, for he elected courses also in the Classics, Physics and
History, doing well enough in all of them to be in the Φ Β Κ and have a
Commencement part. An impression of his versatility is given by the fact
that in his senior year he won a Bowdoin Prize for an essay on “The Rank
of England as a European Power from the Death of Elizabeth to the Death
of Anne,” and spoke his part on “The Nebular Hypothesis.”
Yet he was no recluse; for he was constantly that year at dancing
parties in Boston; and, being naturally sociable, and strongly attached
to his friends, he made many in college. With Harcourt Amory, his
Freshman chum, he went abroad, after graduating in 1876, and spent a
year in Europe. The young men went to London with letters that brought
them into delightful society there, and they travelled over the British
Isles and the Continent. It was mainly the _grand tour_; but although he
wrote many letters, and kept a journal, these, so far as preserved,
reveal little of his personality except a keen joy in natural beauty and
a readiness in acquaintance with people casually met. Alone, he went
down the Danube, and tried,—fortunately without success,—to get to the
front in the war then raging between Servia and Turkey. With Harcourt
Amory he went also to Palestine and Syria, at that time less visited
than they are to-day; but for this part of his journey, where it would
be most interesting, his journal, if written, is lost. His love of
travel had fairly begun.