Biographical Note: Camille Flammarion (1842-1925) was a French astronomer and author of more than 70 books, who did more to encourage public interest in the subject than anyone else of his day, although many of his scientific and philosophical arguments were eccentric. Born in Montigny-le-Roi, he served for some years at the Paris Observatory (beginning in 1858) and at the Bureau of Longitudes, but in 1883 he set up a private observatory at Juvisy, near Paris, and continued his studies, especially of double and multiple stars and of the Moon and Mars. His first book, La pluralité es mondes habité (The Plurality of Inhabited Worlds), originally published in 1862, secured his reputation as both a great popularizer and a leading advocate of extreme pluralism. By 1882, it had gone through 33 editions, and continued to be translated and reprinted well into the 20th century.

 

Flammarion's best-selling work, his epic Astronomie populaire (1880), translated as Popular Astronomy (1894), is filled with speculation about extraterrestrial life. An entire chapter is taken up in arguing the case for lunar life (see Moon, life on), while Mars he considers "an earth almost similar to ours [with] water, air ... showers, brooks, fountains ... This is certainly a place little different from that which we inhabit." In 1892, he speculated further on the fourth planet in his La planèt Mars et ses conditions d'habitabilité though in prose less florid than his earlier work. Concerning the canals (see Mars, canals of), he is open-minded, suggesting "they may be due to superficial fissures produced by geological forces or perhaps even to the rectification of old rivers by the inhabitants for the purpose of the general distribution of water ..." As to martian life, he concludes "the actual habitation of Mars by a race superior to our own is in our opinion very probable" 

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