BIOGRAPHY AND PERSONALITY OF A FAMOUS PISCES: PERCIVAL LOWELL

(born March 13, 1855, Boston, Mass., U.S.—died Nov. 12, 1916, Flagstaff, Ariz.) U.S. astronomer. He was born into a distinguished Boston family. In the 1890s he built a private observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz., to study Mars. He championed the now-abandoned theory that intelligent inhabitants of a dying Mars had constructed a planetwide system of irrigation. He thought that the so-called canals of Mars ( Mars, canals of) were bands of cultivated vegetation dependent on this irrigation. Lowell's theory, long vigorously opposed, was finally put to rest by images received from the U.S. Mariner spacecraft. His prediction of a planet beyond Neptune and his organization of a search for it contributed to the discovery of Pluto in 1930.

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