Augustus Lowell several books on the Far East and on the planet Mars, and founded the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. Their second son, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, succeeded Augustus as Trustee at the Lowell Institute in 1900, and became President of Harvard College in 1909, serving in that capacity until 1933. One of their daughters, Katharine Lowell, married (1) James Alfred Roosevelt, of the Long Island clan, and (2) T. James Bowlker, a Boston cotton mill owner. And their youngest daughter, Amy Lowell, 20 years younger than her brothers, would become the second celebrated poet in the Lowell family (Greenslet 1946). Augustus
Percival Lowell drying planet. While this idea excited the public, the astronomical community was skeptical. Many astronomers could not see these markings, and few believed that they were as extensive as Lowell claimed. As a result, Lowell and his observatory were largely ostracized. Although the consensus was that some actual features did exist which would account for these markings, in 1909 the sixty-inch Mount Wilson Observatory telescope in Southern California allowed closer observation of the structures Lowell had interpreted as canals, and revealed irregular geological features, probably the result of natural erosion. The existence of canal-like features was definitively disproved in the