James Carpenter

“ From our high standpoint, and looking backwards to the sunny side of our cosmorama, we glance over a vast region of the wildest volcanic desolation. Craters from five miles diameter downwards crowd together in countless numbers, so that the surface, as far as the eye can reach, looks veritably frothed over with them. Nearer the base of the rampart on which we stand, extensive mountain chains run to north and to south, casting long shadows towards us; and away to southward run several great chasms a mile wide and of appalling blackness and depth. ”

“ There are abundant causes for grating and crackling sounds, and such are the only sources of noise upon the moon, where there is no life to raise a hum, no wind to murmur, no ocean to boom and foam, and no brook to plash. Yet even these crust-cracking commotions, though they might be felt by the vibrations of the ground, would not manifest themselves audibly, for without air there can be no communication between the grating or cracking body and the nerves of hearing. ”

“ When we turn to the telescope and survey the full disc of the moon with even a very moderate amount of optical aid, the meagre impression as to variety of degree of brightness which the unassisted eye conveys is vastly extended and enhanced, for the surface is seen to be diversified by shades of brilliancy and dullness from almost glittering white to sombre grey: and this variety of shading is rendered much more striking by shielding the eye with a dusky glass from the excessive glare, which drowns the details in a flood of light. ”

“ In every phenomenon of nature upon this earth—the great field from which we must glean our experiences and form our analogies—we see a constant succession of changes going on, a constant progression from one stage of development to another taking place, a perpetual mutation of form and nature of the same material substance occurring: we see the seed transformed into the plant, the flower into the fruit, and the ovum into the animal. ”

“ Next, we come to what is technically termed the mass, but what in common language we may call the weight of the moon. It is important to know this, because the weight of a body taken in connection with its size furnishes us with a knowledge of its density, or the specific gravity of the material of which it is composed. But it is not quite so easy to determine the mass as the dimensions of the moon: to measure it, we have seen is easy enough; to weigh it is a comparatively difficult matter. To solve the problem we have to appeal to Newton’s law of universal gravitation. ”

“ Now a lunar spectator watching the sun eclipsed by the earth, would see, during totality and at a coup d’œil, every point around our world upon which the sun is setting on one side and rising upon the other. To every part of the earth around what is then the margin, as seen from the moon, the sun is upon the horizon, shining through a great thickness of atmosphere, reddening it, and being reddened by it wherever the vaporous conditions conduce to that colouration. ”

“ Upon the moon there is no such modification. The sun’s intrinsic brilliancy is undiminished, its apparent distance is shortened, and it gleams out in fierce splendour only to be realised, and then imperfectly, by the conception of a gigantic electric light a few feet 160 from the eye. ”

“ Finally, there is a use of the moon which touches us, author and 179 reader, very closely. It has taught us of a world in a condition totally different from our own; of a planet without water, without air, without the essentials to life development, but rather with the conditions for life destruction; a planet left by the Creator—for wise purposes that we cannot fully know—as it were but half-formed, with all the igneous foundations fresh from the cosmical fire, and with its rough-cast surface in its original state, its fire and mould-marks exposed to our view. ”

“ As a consequence, no illumination reaches those parts of the scene which do not receive the direct solar rays, save the feeble amount reflected from contiguous illuminated objects, and a small quantity shed by the crescent earth. The shadows have an awful blackness. As we stand upon our chosen point of observation, we see on the lighted side of the rampart almost dazzling brightness, while beneath us, on the side away from the sun, there is a region many miles in area impenetrable to the sight, for there is no object within it receiving sufficient light to render it discernible ”

“ When we pass from the bolder features to the more minute details we find ourselves at a loss for materials for forming an inference; the only map pretending to accuracy even of the larger among small objects being that of Beer and Maedler, which, truly admirable as it is, is not very safely to be relied upon for settling any question of alleged change, on account of the conventional system adopted for exhibiting the forms of objects, every object being mapped rather than drawn, and shown as it never is or can be presented to view on the moon itself. ”

“ Mayer thought his theory out, and rose to its grandest applications. Joule worked his theory out, and gave it the solidity of natural truth. True to the speculative instinct of his country, Mayer drew large and mighty conclusions from slender premises; while the Englishman aimed above all things at the firm establishment of facts.... To each belongs a reputation which will not quickly fade, for the share he has had, not only in establishing the dynamical theory of heat, but also in leading the way towards a right appreciation of the general energies of the universe. ”

“ But a theory of this kind is of no use unless it can be shown to apply in every case; and, moreover, the change must always be in the same direction: to suppose that the moon can turn a fine day to a wet one, and a wet day to a fine morrow indiscriminately, is to make our satellite blow hot and cold with the same mouth, and so to reduce the supposition to an absurdity. If any marked connection existed between the state of the air and the aspect of the moon, it must inevitably have forced itself unsought upon the attention of meteorologists. ”

“ If, then, analogy is any guide in enabling us to infer the appearance of the invisible from that which we know to be of kindred nature and which we have seen, we may justly conclude that were the moon brought sufficiently near to us to exhibit the minute characteristics of its surface, we should behold the same bright and varied colours in and around its craters that we behold in and about those of the earth ”

“ In the plains, what with a low power appeared smooth as a water surface becomes, under greater magnification, a rough and furrowed area, here gently undulated and there broken into ridges and declivities, with now and then deep rents or cracks extending for miles and spreading like river-beds into numerous ramifications. ”

“ But moonlight is, from the very conditions of its production, of such a changeable and fugitive nature, and it affords after all so partial and imperfect an alleviation of night’s darkness, that we are fain to regard the light-giving office of the moon as one of secondary importance. Far more valuable to mankind in general, so estimable as to lead us to place it foremost in our category of lunar offices, is the duty which the moon performs in the character of a sanitary agent. ”

“ Upon two-thirds of the clear nights of a year the finest telescopes cannot be used to their full advantage, because the minute flutterings resulting from the passage of the rays of light through moving strata of air of different densities are magnified just as the image in the telescope is magnified, till all minute details are blurred and confused, and only the grosser features are left visible. And supposing the telescope and atmosphere in good state, there is still an important point, the state of the observer’s eye, to be considered. ”

“ When the sun is really below the horizon, it is nevertheless still visible to us because it is brought up by the refraction of its light by the dense stratum of atmosphere through which the rays have to pass. The sun is, therefore, exactly represented by the coin at the bottom of the basin in the boy’s experiment, the atmosphere answers to the water, and the horizon to the rim or edge of the basin. If there were no atmosphere about the earth, the sun would not be so brought up above the horizon, and, as a consequence, it would set earlier and rise later by about a minute than it really does. ”

“ Confining, then, our attention to the single object of the universe it is our task to treat of—the Moon—and without asserting as an indisputable fact that which we can never hope to know otherwise than by inference and analogy, we may assume that that body once existed in the form of a vast mass of diffused or attenuated matter, and that, by the action of gravitation upon the particles of that matter, it was condensed into a comparatively small and compact planetary body. ”

“ And the brightness is rendered the more striking by the blackness of the surrounding sky. Since there is no atmosphere there can be no sky-light, for there is nothing above the lunar world to diffuse the solar beams; not a trace of that moisture which even in our tropical skies scatters some of the sun’s light and gives a certain degree of opacity or blueness, deep though it be, to the heavens by day. Upon the moon, with no light-diffusing vapour, the sky must be as dark or even darker than that with which we are familiar upon the finest of moonless nights. ”

“ We have learnt that every form of motion is convertible into heat. We know that the falling meteor or shooting star, whose motion is impeded by friction against the earth’s atmosphere, is heated thereby to a temperature of incandescence. Let us then suppose that myriads of such cosmical particles came into collision from the effect of their mutual attraction, or that the component atoms of a vast nebulous mass violently converged under the like influence. ”

“ The circle of light would be, in fact, the ring of twilight round our globe, and it would only appear red in those places where the atmosphere chanced to be in that condition favourable for producing what on earth we know as red sunset and sunrise. We know that the sun, even in clear sky, does not always set and rise with the beautiful red glow, which may be determined by merely local causes, and will therefore vary in different parts of the earth. ”

“ The erroneous ideas upon the moon’s functions as a luminary, to which we allude, are those which are manifested by poets and painters, and even historians, who do not hesitate to bring the moon upon a scene in any form and at any time they please without reference to actual lunar circumstances. It is no uncommon thing to see, in a picture representing an evening scene, a moon introduced which can only be seen in the morning—a waning moon instead of a waxing one ”

“ Although it is impossible for a habitant of this earth fully to realise existence upon the moon, it is yet possible, indeed almost inevitable, for a thoughtful telescopist—watching 158 the moon night after night, observing the sun rise upon a lunar scene, and noting the course of effects that follow till it sets—it is almost inevitable, we say, for such an observer to identify himself so far with the object of his scrutiny, as sometimes to become in thought a lunar being. ”

“ One planet, however, that adorns the sky of the lunar hemisphere which is turned towards us deserves special mention from the conspicuous and highly interesting appearance it must present. We allude to the earth. To nearly one-half of the moon (that which we never see) this imposing object can never be visible; but to the half that faces us the terrestrial planet must appear almost fixed in the sky. ”

“ The hypothesis of Buffon, however, is not sufficient to explain all the phenomena of the planetary system; and it is imperfect, inasmuch as it begins by assuming the sun to be already existing, whereas any theory accounting for the primary formation of the solar system ought necessarily to include the origination of the most important body thereof, the sun itself. Nevertheless, it is but due to Buffon to mention his ideas, for the errors of one philosophy serve a most useful end by opening out fields of inquiry for subsequent and more fortunate speculators. ”

“ In according our thankful reflections to the moon for these revelations, we must not forget that, should there be inhabitants upon our neighbouring worlds, Mercury, Venus, and Mars, which have no satellites, they, the supposed inhabitants, can gain no such knowledge upon the surroundings of the ruler of the solar system. On the other hand, any rational being who may be supposed to dwell upon Saturn or Jupiter, would, through the intervention of their numerous moons, have, in the latter case especially, far more abundant opportunities of acquiring the knowledge in question than we have. ”

“ The centre of motion of the moon being the centre of the earth, it is clear that an observer on the surface of the latter, looks down upon the rising moon as from an eminence, and thus he is enabled to see more or less over or around her. As the moon increases in altitude, the line of sight gradually becomes parallel to the line joining the observer and the centre of the earth, and at length he looks her full in the face: he loses the full view and catches another side face view as she nears the horizon in setting. ”