question of an atmosphere in the moon, and
consequently of its vegetation and the habitability
of its surface, is again taken into consideration
by the most competent astronomers. With
the greater means now at their disposal, we may
entertain more sanguine hopes of their ultimate
success.

Still, there are difficulties in making good
lunar observations. Throughout the whole of
the lunar month, no two days show exactly the
same extent of illuminated disk; the illuminated
sides are different during the first and the latter
halves of the month. The length of the shadows
cast by the very same asperities is constantly
varying from day to day. The full moon is
flooded with light; there is no shadow to give
relief; the tops of the mountains are indicated
only by luminous points, and the ramparts of
the circuses 'by simple lines. At new moon,
there is no light at all, and she cannot even be
distinguished. When two or three days old, the
earthshine on the dark part of the disk is just
sufficient to show that the moon is round, but
not sufficient to enable us to discover any
further details. Certainly, at the first and the last
quarter, when the boundary of the illuminated
part lies in the middle of the disk, the moon
offers a most picturesque spectacle. Earth can
show no scene of ruin, no chaos of destruction,
equal to that presented by the half-lighted and
splintered circuses of the centre. More to the
north, towards the border of the Sea of Rain, is
the grand so-called chain of the Apennines,
displaying their summits as clearly defined as those
of terrestrial mountains whose peaks appear
rising above a distant horizon.

But we must neither expect to see more than
is possible, nor that what we do see should
resemble an earthly landscape. We call the
inhabitants of New Zealand our antipodes, because
they walk with their feet exactly opposite to
ours; when we stand perpendicularly upright
they hang perpendicularly downright. If the
earth were transparent, we should have a full
view of the soles of their feet, with the rest of
their persons foreshortened, as painters call it.
The men in the moon, on the contrary, are
exactly our anticephalæ; their heads are opposite
to ours; if the intervening space were
annihilated, we and they should be laying our heads
together. Consequently, could any telescope
show us an inhabitant of the moon, we should
see him exactly as we look down upon a
passenger in the street walking on the pavement
immediately beneath our third-story window.
We could only see the crown of his hat, his
shoulders, the point of his nose, the tips of his
toes, and perhaps the equatorial regions of his
corpulency. To know what he is really like, we
should have to request him to lie down on the
flat of his buck, and then to roll over and show
his other side. The same of lunar animals;
their dogs and horses would appear in the same
position as flies crawling up a wall or on a ceiling.
One advantage we gain by this; we can
peep down the immense craters of the moon's
volcanoes, and see what there is inside them.

The highest magnifying power which can at
the same time be most usefully employed in our
climate is that of one hundred diameters, which
brings our satellite to an apparent distance of
something less than two thousand five hundred
miles. Beer and Maeder could not
advantageously go beyond a power of three hundred
diameters, reducing her distance to eight
hundred miles. But even that is still too far off to
examine an unknown country with any minuteness.
Lord Rosse has brought much higher
powers to bear upon the moon, on whose surface
his gigantic telescope clearly distinguishes areas
of about eighty yards square. Therefore,
although it would not show us a lunar elephant,
nevertheless vast herds of animals, like the
crowds of buffaloes in North America, would be
perfectly visible, as would also be the case with
armies marching in battle array. Towns analogous
to ours could not escape our observation,
any more than the courses of rivers, of canals,
of roads, and of railways, and especially regular
plantations and other crops that are grown on a
scale of any magnitude.

Some of the above-mentioned optical appliances
bring the moon sufficiently near to enable
us to study her geology. No earthly scene, as
already stated, can give any idea of the desolation
reigning there. The whole sphere appears
to have been formerlv torn up from its very
entrails. The so-called seas are most generally
supposed to be arid plains of sand. The circular
ramparts of the mountains, in shape like
amphitheatres, enclose vast craters with one or more
cones rising from their bottom. These ramparts
are broken by a multitude of breaches, and at
their feet lie prodigious heaps of shattered rocks,
which do not appear to be held together or
covered by any sort of vegetable mould. Lord
Rosse's telescope shows the flat bottom of the
grand crater of Albategnes to be completely
sprinkled over with broken rocks; and Father
Secchi has obtained a photographic image of the
enormous fragments of rock which are piled at
the bottom of the annular enclosure which forms
the Circus of Copernicus.

More than two centuries ago, Robert Hooke,
the contemporary and opponent of Newton,
believed he had discovered the secret of the
moon's geological formations. He is said to
have obtained artificial imitations of the lunar
craters, by boiling thick calcareous mud until the
disengagement of its elastic vapours produced
bubbles on its surface, which, in bursting, left
cavities with an annular edge. If the same
process once took place in the moon, both water
and gas must have existed there; and, as nothing
is annihilated, we may ask what became of
them. Can they be decomposed and combined
with other substances, or are they lying
concentrated and hid in the deep hollows and wide
chasms with which there is every reason to
believe the interior of the moon is torn and
dislocated.

M. Faye, a distinguished French astronomer,
says that the moon's surface is quite new, so to
speak; that is, it has undergone no wear and