The Moon
MANY poets, and some more practical people, have striven to express the intensity of their longing to divine the conditions prevailing upon the other planets which journey with us around the sun. Doubtless many have sought this knowledge with a deep desire to find there the solution of some of the insoluble riddles our world is always making; but the most have only wanted a momentary sensation, such as the common mind gets from mere novelty. If science could give them the eye of omniscience, they would come back to the dear commonplaces of the world only to become more determinedly narrowed by its uses. The intensity of the intellectual gravitation which, happily enough, keeps the minds of most men, as it does their bodies, well down to the grubbing work of life, can only be measured by those who have watched the relations of astronomical science, especially in its new phases, to the popular mind. As long as the curious eye of the speculator could only look into the shallow mysteries of the firmament built by man, there were always more students of astronomy than any other branch of science. But since discovery and invention have opened an infinite universe before us, since those flickering points of light have become each the centre of a world system rather than some accident in a man-made heaven, we have rather lost interest in the stars. There is probably a good reason for a part of this to be found in the enhanced value which our earth has had given it by modern science. Affection for the stars was once a polite way of showing a contempt for the earth; but the same science which has lifted the heavens until their depths dizzy us, has also made our earth a respectable object of consideration: man has found, in the long-shunned but inevitable question whether he came from the worm through the monkey, enough to try his brains, and his stomach too, for years to come. Until he has got rid of this enormous question of his own origin and destiny, until his eager eyes have explored the just seen abyss of time up which he has been climbing for a hundred millions of years, we can hardly expect him. to look up to the stars. Nebulas and star-drift in due time ; but blood is thicker than ether, and one’s ancestors nearer than the nearest stars.
Following up his ancestral line from step to step, over the slippery and sometimes distant stepping-stones by which we reach the past of our earth, man finally arrives at a time when the record is lost or illegible. Then there arise questions concerning the early state of our earth which cannot be answered from the evidence which it alone affords. Our only chance to obtain information on these matters is to look to the other worlds, and get from them what we can in the way of facts to illustrate that part of our earth’s history which is not recorded in the “ great stone book.” The evolution of our earth can in this way be traced in time, very much as we trace the evolution of an animal, not from itself alone, but by the stages shown in its kindred. For the present we must content ourselves with the appliances of investigation, as yet imperfect, and limit our efforts to the bodies which share with us the government of our sun. Of these, the moon alone is in that close relation to the earth which makes it possible to push our inquiries into details. There, at least, our knowledge goes very far. Few of those who have only seen the moon with the naked eye have an idea of the extent and accuracy of the information which has been gained concerning its physical character. It is not too much to say that we know the general topography of this side of the moon much better than we know that of any of the great land masses of the earth except Europe. There is not one crater over a mile in diameter, nor a single hill a thousand feet high, which has not been seen again and again by the many observers who are now studying its surface. Mountains might be made or unmade even in the centre of our oldest and most peopled continents, and the scientific world know nothing of it; but it is hardly possible for any considerable change to take place on the hither side of that world a quarter of a million miles away, without being observed before a single month elapses. We may see more clearly just what the observing powers are, if we conceive the astronomer placed in the moon and looking down upon the surface of North America with the same powers that the observer can apply to our satellite. By the naked eye, with the earth full lit by the sun, the twin continents of North and South America could be seen for their whole length at once. In the twelve hours in which they would swing up from the darkness, and back into it again, as the earth made its daily revolution, every part of this ten thousand miles of land would be easily looked over. The mountains and deserts would show on the greenish, verdure-clad continents; the environing sea would throw back varied tints according to its state of agitation or repose. Though the great features of land and sea would be visible, all detail would be wanting. The great lakes would separate themselves confusedly from the land; but the rivers, the valleys, the regions of forest and prairie, would remain undefined to our lunar astronomer until his glass was brought to bear on them, and even then would not be distinctly seen. Waiting until the earth ran past its full stage and the light began to leave one border, with dark shadow and bright light combining to give definition to the objects as they passed, he would use his telescope to advantage. Here, on the edge of the sunlit region, every hill and valley would have the sharpest definition; the precise position of every mountain top, the course of every broken valley, would be defined under this oblique light. Our far-away student would have a special difficulty which we do not encounter in our study of the less erratic moon, arising from the earth’s rotation. To get a clearer idea of the power of such an instrument as the fifteen-inch refractor, which we will suppose our lunar student to be using, let us imagine that on a favorable night he with his highest powers was endeavoring to make the most detailed study of the city of Boston. He should be using a magnifying power of about twelve hundred diameters. This would be approximately the same thing as bringing himself within two hundred miles of the place as seen with the naked eye. He would see the general outlines of the coast and the indentation of the bay and harbor with perfect distinctness; the larger islands they contain, and the arms of sea which extend from them into the land, would also he easily seen. The city itself and the surrounding towns would appear only as a small fleck upon the surface of the land. No object less than about two hundred feet in diameter would be visible to the clearest eye. The State House might be seen as a mere point of light, but the other buildings would be recognizable by their shadows alone. The streets, though less than a hundred feet in width, would appear as fine dark lines on an illuminated surface. Long railway cuttings would also, when in shadow, become visible. The lunar observer would be able to see enough to make sure that there was a city there, though he could not see anything of its life. The meteorological phenomena of the earth would be the grandest feature of its surface as seen from the moon; the coming and going of the mantles of white and green on either hemisphere with the changing year, the movement of the great storms, and especially the flashes of lightning, must give a variety to the scene of which the moon, with its unchanging face, can afford us no idea.
With some conception of the power which the best instruments give us over the details of the moon’s surface, we may begin our study without danger of being led into those vagaries which have beset the ways of many speculators devoting themselves to this subject. Seen with the naked eye the moon shows us only a surface of varied brightness, some of the darker parts being distinctly bounded and arranged in a belt-like way across its surface. These obscure markings are just distinct enough to invite conjecture while baffling it. Out of them have been made all sorts of shapes, but the conjectures of centuries did nothing towards attaining the truth. If we begin our journey towards the moon with the lowest power of the telescope, say fifty diameters, which takes us to within about five thousand miles of its surface, those enigmatical markings become distinct, and there appears a throng of objects not seen before. If the moon be full we can see that the dark flecks are all more of less complete circles, some standing out distinctly separated from the rest of the surface, while others are rather confusedly merged together. Over the surface of these dark regions, which the eye at once perceives to be lower than the general surface, as well as over the higher country, lie scattered myriads of pits which range in size from circles hundreds of miles across, down, by an imperceptible gradation, to the smallest that we can perceive with the power we are using; around these pits there is often a rim which shines brighter than the rest of the surface, and from some of the larger pits there run long bands of light which stretch far away over the surface, sometimes for hundreds of miles, and, in many cases, traversing other pits of great depth, without turning from their course. On some parts of the moon’s surface there are great tracts which show no sign of these pits, and give the even light which would seem to belong to smooth surfaces; in other regions the pits are so crowded that they jostle and crowd each other as the cells in a honey-comb.
The full moon, though on account of its greater brilliancy the natural object of curiosity on the part of every one who looks through a telescope, teaches less than the earlier stages of illumination. Those who would see a little at a time, and that well, should begin their work when the moon is the frail crescent in the half light of the late sunset. If the student will watch his chance, he will find that some evening he can see with the naked eye, besides the little crescent of light, the dusky figure of the dark part of the moon filling its horns and extending the arc to the full circle. From the earliest times this strange spectre of the unillumed part of the moon attracted the notice of observers, but it remained for Leonardo da Vinci to tell us that it was the glow of light from our earth, which is “full” to the moon while our satellite is new to us, that caused this light on the dark part of the moon. It is, in other words, the earth-shine coming back to us from the moon, that gives this indistinct glow to the part of the moon’s face which has not yet caught the sun’s light. With a telescope of the first class the observer sees in this earth-shine a faint outline of all the great features which come into distincter view when they get the stronger sunlight upon them. Nothing among the revelations of space approaches this phenomenon in certain features of a spectral and shadowy kind. The yawning craters, those wonderful lines of light which run from certain centres, the great ranges of precipitous mountains, themselves the remnants of crater walls, all seem transformed to mere ghosts of their hardlined selves. As the eye becomes accustomed to the faint, uncertain light, one object after another creeps into view, until the whole moon is distinctly mapped before it. As the moon grows to us our earth wanes to her, so that little by little these ghostly hills and mountains fade away, and everything is dark again except the sunlit crescent.
Turning now to this brightly illuminated region, we find something very different from what the faint earth-shine showed us. As we pass slowly towards the illuminated region, letting the telescope drift as it were by the earth’s rotation, we begin at last to see all at once some bright points, the summits of lofty mountains which are just catching the light of the long lunar day. Near to these golden crowned mountains — for the curve of the moon is so sharp that this intermediate region is but narrow — comes the ragged border of the sunlight. Here the effects are surprisingly grand: every hill is a mass of light upon its sunward face, and shadow of the deepest kind on the other side. Wherever we may have happened to come upon the moon’s surface there are sure to be profound abysmal craters, whose crests are clearly defined in the sunlight, while the cavities are blackest shadow. Between these hollowed mountains the surface is sown with small, irregular hills and valleys, utterly without order of arrangement. Here and there is a narrow black line which marks the place of some deep rent reaching down into the crust and far away over the rugged surface. All along the line where light and shadow meet, we have a succession of these simple topographical elements combined in the most varied fashion. The craters are in a general way like our terrestrial volcanoes, but differ from them in many very important points. The hills are far lower and less massive in proportion to the diameter and depth of the cups which crown them. A large part of the craters are circular depressions some thousands of feet deep, with vertical walls and a diameter of from one to ten miles, the encircling mountain being only a few hundred feet high and relatively as narrow as a well-curbing. Some of the larger craters show traces of what may be lava streams, but most of these openings differ from terrestrial volcanoes also, in the fact that there are no signs whatever of those great rivers of once molten matter which mark the country about the greater part of our earth’s craters. At some points on the earth’s surface we have cavities not unlike those on our satellite. Along the Rhine the craters of the Eifel, mere circular pits with hardly a trace of wall about them, furnish us with very close analogies of the lunar craters. It is quite evident that the Eifel volcanoes were outlets of gas escaping with explosive suddenness, scattering the materials torn from the crater far and wide over the surface of the adjacent country. These lunar craters seem also to mark the work of some gaseous agent, but the shape of their walls and floors gives us good reason to believe that they were far more heated than the Eifel craters. The curves are soft and rounded, as if they had been fused and flowing at the time of their formation. Ranging over more surface, as the moon steadily grows, we find that these pits, though generally less than five miles across, are at times far larger. Looking closely, we see that the smaller the craters, the more distinct and well preserved they generally are; observing the way in which they cut each other, we can also determine that the lesser craters are the last formed. The larger rings are the most ruinous, but we can still see that they are essentially like the smaller circles, though we can trace them in successive gradations up to three hundred miles or more in diameter. The great basins of the seas, though not so clearly defined as the lesser craters, on account of their worn condition and the fusion of several together, are still evidently of the same origin. Even the long, curved ridges cut into myriads of sharp pinnacles, which look like mountain chains, and have received the fanciful names of Alps and Apennines, are also the remains of old crater walls of vast extent, which have been ruined by the subsequent changes.
Nothing shows more clearly the intensity of human prejudices than the notions concerning the moon which have found a place in the minds of even excellent observers. It seemed so natural to find there a little reprint of out earth, that a thing had only to be seen to get a place among the familiar objects around us here. The low-walled dark-colored plains, which we have classed along with the smaller craters, were seas to the early observers. The narrow lines of black, which the higher powers of the telescope show us to be jagged rents on the uneven face of the moon, were river paths to them. The bands of light were roads of more than Roman length and straightness; and whenever some curious structure, freak of the Titanic forces which built the moon’s surface, puzzled the fertile imagination of the observer, he made of it a ruined castle or other architectural work of the sons of the “ man in the moon.” One of the most trustworthy students of the moon, in the early part of this century, a man trained in many branches of research, was a firm believer in the Selene. Purple cities and castles abounded in his moon; he even went so far as to suppose that the curious twin craters called Meissier, with their tail of light so curiously like a comet, was an effort of the lunar people to communicate with those on our earth. The poor, far-away people were trying to signal our beautiful earth, and had, regardless of expense, constructed this vast picture of the flaming messengers of heaven. Alas for the romantic things of the world! All this picture of life in our nearest companion in space falls before the stern teachings of the telescope. It is true that we can see nothing as small as the largest living being of our earth; even the greatest human works might escape the observer’s eye; but there are things as plain as sight, to prove that the moon is an impossible place for all that is called life on our earth’s surface. The sharpness of the shadows, and the silhouette clearness of the lunar landscape, long ago made the students suspect that there was no atmosphere there. This impression was deepened when after more than a century of watching no trace of cloud had ever been seen on the moon; always the same even face; nothing that could be held as evidence of the slightest vapor. This old conjecture has of late been made certain in the fact that when, with the greatest care on the part of the observer, stars were watched as they passed behind the moon, it was found that they moved with perfect steadiness up to the very edge of its disk, and then were instantly blotted out. Had there been an atmosphere the stars would have been retarded in their eclipse and advanced in their reappearance thereby, so that they would have been hidden for a less time by the moon. This observation, tallying as it does with so many other considerations which point to the same conclusion, makes it quite safe for us to affirm that the moon is without that first condition of life, an atmosphere. The evidence of the absence of water is quite as clear as that which leads us to deny the presence of air on the moon. The great changes of temperature which come between the day of three hundred hours and the night of equal length would necessarily drive all the water on the moon into a state of vapor, and reduce it to far below the freezing point during each lunar month; this would necessarily give us effects of the most tangible kind, which could not escape the astronomer’s eye. If we accept the moon without air and without water, we abandon thereby all idea of peopling it with living beings; at least with such structures as our terrestrial experience supplies us with. Through the air and ocean comes all that gives to our earth the features we call beautiful; there is clearly nothing worthy of that name on that lonely star; its only enchantment is lent it by distance. Seen closely as we view an earthly landscape, there would be grandeur enough in the weird forms of its stately mountains and yawning chasms. But the blackest desolation our earth supplies would seem soft and rich-colored by the side of those wastes of dark lava which send down to us the mild moonlight.
If we must give up the pleasant delusion of life on our sister star, can we not at least suppose that it once was there ? may it not be that the moon has only gone more rapidly towards the end which some savans prophesy for our earth, when the air and ocean shall have lost their oxygen to the greedy bases of the earth? Beneath the rude surface which the telescope shows us, can there not be a burial-place for the record of a life as great or greater than our earth itself supplies? Here the answer of the observer is clear, if not as assured as upon the other questions. If our earth were to lose its water and air from any cause, there would remain, with all the permanence which belongs to the feature lines of the moon, the record which water has written on its face. The great continental folds, the water-worn mountains, the drainage system of the continents, with its river beds, its lake basins, and watersheds, would all remain monuments of the vanished force. But on the moon there is no mark of water action; searching it all over we find no trace of river or lake, no valleys, no deltas such as rivers would have made, nothing to be compared with our continents, but everywhere the same mystic, far-traced circles.
As all the movements which have taken place upon the surface of the moon have been brought about by its internal forces, it becomes a matter of great interest to determine whether these forces are stilled. If we cannot look for organic life there, can we not at least look for some physical activity? This of course must be, to a large extent, a matter for simple observation to determine. Our knowledge of the moon is sufficient to enable us to determine any great changes. The outbreak of a great volcanic eruption could not be overlooked by the observers who are continually studying it, provided it was attended with any of the great gaseous emanations which usually mark such events on our earth. We are not without descriptions of accidents on its surface, which would be explicable on the supposition that there was something like volcanic action on the moon. Most of these accounts are evidently the products of the uncritical spirit which tried to see in the moon all the phenomena the earth affords. A few years ago, however, Dr. I. F. Julius Schmidt, of the Athens Observatory, thought that he had detected a change in the form of one of the smaller craters, that which bears the name of the illustrious Linnæus. The crater is a small one for the moon, though some six miles across, and the observations are subject to great doubt. Out of a long discussion has come the conclusion that the assertion has not been proved. The Rev. T. N. Webb thinks that he has found a change in the singular pair of craters called Meissier, but these changes are not of a very distinct kind, and may be accounted for in another fashion. At first sight there does not appear to he any good reason why there should not still be volcanic action on the moon; but a little consideration will show that there is one very considerable difficulty which we are compelled to face, when we accept the theory of continued activity of the internal heat of our satellite. The heat of our own earth, as well as that which the moon once had, was derived from the original store of the gaseous mass out of which they both were made. The amount of heat in each body must have been proportioned to the mass. Now as cooling goes on with a rapidity proportionate to the mass, and to the area of the surface through which the heat escapes, the moon should have lost all its heat long before the earth had parted with one fourth of its original store. So we must suppose either that the moon has entirely cooled, or that the earth has still over three fourths of its original store of heat. The latter supposition will be regarded as quite inadmissible by every student of the physics of the globe; so we are in a measure compelled to believe that the internal fires of the moon are quite burnt out.
There is a source of change on the moon’s surface which has been quite overlooked by astronomers, but which in itself is sufficient to account for the occurrence of considerable disturbances. On the airless, cloudless moon we have the sun’s heat looking down through its day, half a month of our own. This is followed by an equal time during which the heat as steadily flows off into space. This gives, of course, a great range of temperature. It has been reckoned by a competent student, that the moon passes through a range of temperature of nearly a thousand degrees of Fahrenheit, from —84° to 840°. This change, or anything approaching it, could not be repeated at each moon without having a prodigious effect upon its surface by the expansion and contraction alone. A mass of lava such as forms the flow of many of the lunar craters could expand and contract as much as the one hundredth of its length in this change. This would naturally tend to disturb the whole surface. The tension would not be uniform, but very variable; each new fissure would, by its forming, change the direction and intensity of the creeping movement, which must affect the whole surface. We can readily conceive that the walls of craters might be broken down, or pinnacled cliffs overturned, by these repeated changes of tension. It is quite conceivable that in time this slow but incessant movement might overturn all the grand reliefs of the moon’s surface and leave nothing but the wrecks of its gigantic architecture. The ancient craters whose weird walls are to he found over a large part of the moon may have been razed by this slow-acting agent of destruction.
The other side of the moon, being always turned away from the earth, has been the natural refuge of the romantic school of selenographers. Since it is forever invisible to human eyes, they have felt that they could people it to suit themselves. Some years ago the distinguished Danish astronomer, Hansen, broached the theory, supported by some elaborate calculations, that the side of the moon turned towards the earth was far higher than the other side, being lifted above it by fourteen miles or more. It. was easy to conjecture in this case that air and water might be placed on that side which is forever shut out from the eye of man. The invisible will always be the unnatural to some minds; but we can do something to show that the other side of the moon is like enough to that which faces us. It is to be noticed in the first place that though at one time the isolated observer sees only a trifle less than half the surface of the moon, yet by following the moon through all its periodic changes of position, he will see rather over four sevenths of the whole surface of the sphere. If the unseen part differs so widely from the visible as some suppose it may, then we should expect that the border would at least give us the beginning of the new order of things; but up to the farthest bounds of vision, we find the same wonderful association of craters, fissures, and ragged points of rock which make up the lunar landscape. Moreover, on the extreme verge of the moon we have some great lines of mountain ranges known as the Dairfel and the Rook Mountains; these greatranges, it is quite evident from their form, are segments of vast crater circles such as we have in the Apennines and all the other great mountains of the moon. Now if we complete in imagination, or by tracing upon a globe, these circles, we find that we are enabled to extend with tolerable certainty the topography of this face of the moon for some distance beyond the extreme point of vision. On the opposite, or northern side of the moon, there are a few bands of light, rather indistinct but still visible, which extend around from the other side. Analogy shows us that these bands are always arranged with reference to some crater in a radial fashion; so we may reasonably suppose that these lines which come around from the other side are also a part of some ray system which lies beyond the border. I am inclined to think that this centre is probably some four hundred and fifty miles beyond the border. If these views be correct we have only a few hundred miles, not over eight hundred miles, in diameter, concerning which we have not at least a probable basis for conjecture.
To those who have the hardihood to define the purpose of the physical universe, who look upon life, sentient life, as the aim of all things, the moon, as we now know it, is a sad difficulty. It is a great world complete in most of the machinery which fits our own for life, but an abiding desolation, because of its want of the two or three elements which give us water and air.
Those who have tiled to excogitate the peopling of the planets, from the slender basis of fact that observation affords us, get very little encouragement from the condition of the moon. Here is a twin sister of the earth, with what seemed in the early days of astronomy every condition for the fullest development of life, utterly and hopelessly barren. On our earth, life after its first planting seems the most necessary phenomenon of its surface; from each successive shock it has come out greater and higher than before, but at our next door in space it has never existed, never can exist. It would be a painful thing to believe that the earth alone had drawn the prize of life, while its companions had blanks alone; nor does the condition of the moon really go far towards compelling us to such an opinion; it only inculcates caution. The planets Venus and Mars, our neighbors above and below in space, have atmospheres. The latter has snow and ice, and seas of curious form, so that on these planets the only evident obstacle to life on the moon does not exist. No naturalist can watch winter and summer come and go on the opposite hemispheres of the martial planet, without feeling that life must have come into being where all the machinery of life is in such perfect working. And yet, having studied the moon, he must have a fear that after all there may be a certain something wanting to complete the scheme and bring in that strangely conditioned thing we call life.
Though the moon have no life of its own, it is not without potent influence on the life of our earth. There has never been a day since life began but the moon’s influence has been at work to make or mar the fate of living things. But for the perpetual motion the tides bring into the waters of the sea, the evervarying change of pressure to which it subjects all that comes within their scope, we may safely assume that life would have been something very different from what it is at present. There can be no doubt that its influence has been to hasten the journey up from the origin of life to its summit; we cannot reckon how much has been due to the influence of our moon in the advance of organic existence, but any naturalist who has adequately conceived how dependent we are for our state upon the life of an almost infinite chain of beings in the past, will be ready to acknowledge that he could not have been where or what he is, but for the silent working of that lifeless world above us.
There is an influence not without interest, which the moon exerts upon the earth; it was long ago noticed that there was a great accession of earthquakes, in regions liable to such disturbances, during the time of the month when the moon cooperated the most effectively with the sun in producing an attraction upon the earth. It is not likely, however, that the action results in any actual increase in the total number of earthquake shocks in a given period, but rather in an accumulation of these at particular times, so that as this effect is more curious than important, we may save ourselves the trouble of an inquiry into its cause.
But there is another way in which the moon exerts a most important effect upon our earth, acting through the tides. As these masses of water move around the earth in a direction exactly contrary to the earth’s rotation, it is readily conceived that they exert a good deal of friction upon its surface. This, though slight, is still a measurable quantity, and tends to bring the earth in time to a stand-still. It would long ago have made an appreciable lengthening of the day, but, owing to one of the many compensations which go far to keep up the even course of events in the solar system, this friction of the tides is just balanced by the shrinkage of the earth. If the earth without any change of mass should be made smaller than it is, without loss of the velocity of rotation which is impressed on every particle of its matter, then it would rotate more rapidly. Now it is clear that the earth by its continued loss of heat must be continually shrinking; the folds of the earth’s crust in its continents and mountain chains are irresistible proofs of the truth of this conclusion. There is no other conclusion that can reasonably be accepted, save that the shrinking of the earth and the friction of the tides so balance our planet that the day remains unchanged. The earliest living beings on the earth’s surface were probably at least two hundred miles farther from the earth’s centre than their descendants are at the present time, but the distance between dawn and nightfall is probably not materially changed. In the distant future, when the loss of heat shall have gone so far that the earth no longer shrinks by a man’s height in each thousand years, then the days will begin to lengthen, and grow longer and longer while the tides chafe the shores.
The picture which modern science paints of the moon is cold and hard, and at first sight saddening. It is no more the land of dreams, a refuge for those who find our blooming earth too hard. Its death is the old eternal death of chaos; it has not even the charm of life extinct. Fertilizing sunshine, the source of all movement here, does not break its lifelessness. It seems a very mockery of our earth, a grinning skeleton at our feast to tell us that “ to this complexion we must come at last.”
The tower of the observatory at Cambridge lies in one of the most charming scenes in the world. From its summit we look down over a wide lawn to the clustering homes of many villages, and to the stately edifices of a great city. There are rivers flowing to the sea eternal, hills, woods, noble buildings filled with the treasures of thought and action, monuments of battles, temples to creative power, a panorama of life, the exuberant life of this glorious old world. Many a time have I lingered in view of this lovely scene, almost loath to fly with the speed of light to that vast halfcreated world. With the telescope we seem to go with the quickness of sight away from the present, to stand in the face of primeval chaos. Life, so allpervading, so enduring but a moment ago, seems but a vapor that might be breathed away. Standing in the presence of a worse than ruined world, we feel our confidence in the universe to be weakly founded. Beneficence, creative power, omniscience, — all the great words we coin for use on earth seem to have no place here, and we come sobered and saddened to earth again. But with time the lesson loses its severity, and is seen in better and truer shape. It teaches not mistrust in the world, but a consciousness of our own short vision, however aided. There may be something higher than organic life, something to which all this world of existence is subordinated as the atom is to the universe. Because two atoms differ, must the whole be a muddle? With time, the persistent student of the moon will find its silence and peace wonderfully attractive. He will betake himself there for a quiet more pervading than the bustle of the living earth can ever give. He will find it a physical Nirvana where matter has lost its eagerness and endless longings to rest in peace. When he comes back to the earth again, puts the nightcap on his telescope, and betakes himself to his own, we are sure that he will be the more content with our world and all its ways.
N. S. Shaler.