150 COSMOS. 



Moon, some of the spots are visible to the naked eye ; the 

 ridge of the Apennines, the dark, elevated plain Grimaldus, 

 the inclosed Mare Crisium, and TycJw,* crowded round 

 with numerous mountain ridges and craters. It has been 

 affirmed, not without probability, that it was especially the 

 aspect of the Apennine chain which induced the Greeks to 

 consider the spots on the Moon to be mountains, and at the 

 same time to associate with them the shadow of Mount 

 Athos, which in the solstices reached the Brazen Cow upon 

 Lernnos. Another very fantastic opinion was that of Agesi- 

 nax, disputed by Plutarch, according to which the Moon's 

 disk was supposed, like a mirror, to present to us again, ca- 

 toptrically, the configuration and outline of our continent, 

 and the outer sea (the Atlantic). A very similar opinion ap- 

 pears to have been preserved to this time as a popular belief 

 among the people in Asia Minor. t 



By the careful application of large telescopes, it has grad- 



* For proofs of the visibility of these four objects, see in Beer and 

 Madler, Der Mond., p. 241, 338, 191, and 290. It is scarcely necessary 

 to mention that all which refers to the topography of the Moon's surface 

 is derived from the excellent work of my two friends, of whom the 

 second, William Beer, was taken from us but too early. The beautiful 

 Uebersicktsblatt, which Madler published in 1837, three years after the 

 large map of the Moon, consisting of three sheets, is to be recommended 

 for the purpose of more easily becoming acquainted with the bearings. 



t Plut., De Facie in Orbe Luna, p. 726-729, Wytteu. This passage 

 is, at the same time, not without interest for ancient geography. See 

 Humboldt, Examen Critique de VHist. de la Geogr., torn, i., p. 145. 

 With regard to other views of the ancients, see Anaxagoras and De- 

 mocritus, in Plut., De Plac. Philos., ii., 25 ; Parmeuides, in Stob., p. 419, 

 453, 516, and 563, ed. Heeren; Schneider, Eclogce Physicae, vol. i., p. 

 433443. According to a veiy remarkable passage in Plutarch's Life 

 of Nicias, cap. 42, Anaxagoras himself, who calls "the mountainous 

 Moon another Earth," had made a drawing of the Moon's disk. (Com- 

 pare also Origines, Pkilosophumena, cap. 8, ed. Mttlleri, 1851, p. 14.) 

 I was once very much astonished to hear a very well-educated Per- 

 sian, from Ispahan, who certainly had never read a Greek book, men- 

 tion, when I showed him the Moon's spots in a large telescope in Paris, 

 the hypothesis of Agesiuax (alluded to in the text) as to the reflection, 

 as a widely-diffused popular belief in his country. " What we see 

 there in the Moon," said the Persian, "is ourselves; it is the map of 

 our Earth." One of the interlocutors in Plutarch's Moon-dialogue would 

 not have expressed himself otherwise. If it can be supposed that men 

 are inhabitants of the Moon, destitute of water and air, the Earth, with 

 its spots, would also present to them such a map upon a nearly black 

 sky by day, with a surface fourteen times greater than that which the 

 full Moon presents to us, and always in the same position. But the 

 constantly varying clouds and obscurities of our atmosphere would con- 

 fuse the outlines of the continents. Compare M&dler'sAstron., p. 169 

 and Sir John Herschel, Outlines, 436. 



