MOON, KECENT OBSERVATIONS AND STUDY OF THE. 



585 



the dew-fall is the heaviest. Even we who 

 are native to the planet are not proof against 

 tbe fatal effects of our own cloud-system : when 

 by sinking to the surface they envelop us, they 

 are invariably laden with malarial effects, re- 

 sulting in consumption, rheumatism, colds, and 

 coughs, and communicating to us the germs of 

 diseases of all descriptions. Who has not heard 

 the sick and dying declare that when the air 

 cleared up they would get well ? Yet we have 

 been taught to believe that our moon is a dead 

 world, because those agents of death do not 

 float in her atmosphere. That the lunar at- 

 mosphere is sufficiently dense to sustain clouds 

 above her surface, has apparently been proved 

 upon more than one occasion; for several trust- 

 worthy observers have asserted that they have 

 seen a small basin, called Linn6, obscured by 

 vapors that rise above it, and the same phe- 

 nomena have presented themselves over other 

 small basins. These clouds soon disappeared, 

 however, doubtless for want of sufficient sup- 

 ply of antozone to support them as visible va- 

 por.' The same authorities inform us that 

 there is no water upon the moon, and yet 

 again and again its waters have presented 

 themselves in their telescopes, but, for want of 

 knowledge of optical phenomena, they have 

 failed to comprehend or interpret their signifi- 

 cance. Thus we have the theories that " there 

 is no water upon the moon " ; that " if there 

 were, the attraction of the earth would take 

 it away from her " ; that " the waters of that 

 body have all sunk into her interior " ; u that 

 owing to her being swung about by the earth, 

 her waters have all been forced to the apex of 

 the side that is turned away from us"; that 

 "the cold to which a body without an atmos- 

 phere would be exposed in space would have 

 long since congealed the waters into ice," etc. 

 Every observer that has given much attention 

 to the examination of the lunar surface has 

 seen in his telescope, at times, bright star-like 

 points or curving streaks, so different from 

 the ordinary surf ace that they glitter in compari- 

 son with it. They all alike have the character- 

 istic of remaining visible there for twenty or 

 thirty minutes, and then fading into a dark, 

 steel-gray. The observer that sees these points 

 or streaks glitter upon any occasion may or 

 may not ever see those same locations present 

 this brightness again; but in their steel-gray 

 aspect they are always visible when their loca- 

 tion is favorable for examination, though un- 

 expectedly at any moment there may present 

 themselves in the telescope one, two, or a dozen 

 of those seen before, in their glittering aspect ; 

 while others, not seen before, may accompany 

 them. They are to be found in many places 

 across the central regions of the globe's surface 

 from east to west, but only in very narrow belts 

 at the same time. Their reappearance in their 

 sparkling phase is so capricious that Beer and 

 Madler sought, for over thirty years, for one 

 described by Schroter, and, after they had con- 

 cluded that he had made a mistake, the spot 



described presented itself to them in its star- 

 like aspect. They could always see it in its 

 steel-gray color, when the light permitted, and 

 found its breadth to be almost two miles ; but 

 they never again saw that particular one with 

 its " Sunday clothes on." Some locations of 

 the lunar surface are at times seen to be so 

 thickly studded with minute points of light as 

 to appear nebulous. They are known not to be 

 hillocks or depressions, for they cast no shad- 

 ows in any angle of sunlight, either inward or 

 outward; they are therefore horizontal surfaces, 

 and their sparkle proves them to have the light- 

 reflecting qualities of a smooth sheet of water. 

 As nothing but fluid would assume a horizontal 

 position on the surface of a globe, it follows 

 that these horizontal reflecting surfaces are 

 fluid of some kind. A moment's consideration 

 will show why such horizontal reflecting sur- 

 faces should be so rarely seen in their spark- 

 ling aspect, and so constantly seen in the prop- 

 er phases of illumination, in their steel-gray 

 appearance. As the angle of incidence is al- 

 ways equal to that of reflection, it follows that 

 when the sun, the reflecting surface, and the 

 observer sustain these relations to each other, 

 in a plane that passes through the three points, 

 the observer must always see the sunlight re- 

 flected from the intermediate surface ; but the 

 least change in the position of any one of the 

 three would cause the reflected beam to pass 

 the position of the observer without entering 

 his telescope. As the moon has a motion of 

 libration, and a motion in its orbit about the 

 earth, while the earth and moon together have 

 a motion about the sun, the relative positions 

 of the sun, moon, and observer can not be sus- 

 tained longer than twenty or thirty minutes ; 

 hence the passing of the sparkling point of 

 light out of the telescope. As the dark field 

 of the sky is in every direction excepting the 

 small portion occupied by the solar disk, some 

 portion of it must always be in position to be 

 reflected into the telescope by those lunar mir- 

 rors, hence they can be seen in their dark as- 

 pects whenever the region of their location is 

 illuminated. Those points are, for the most 

 part, circular, the largest of them measuring 

 about six miles across, from which they dimin- 

 ish until they become immeasurable; and since 

 their numbers increase as their size diminishes, 

 it is probable that still greater numbers exist, 

 whose dimensions are too small to reflect a 

 beam of light that would be visible at the earth. 

 If water exists upon the moon, then this is the 

 mode of its distribution. But it seems never 

 to have occurred to the philosophers that wa- 

 ter could exist upon the surface of a celestial 

 globe in any other form of distribution than 

 that found upon the earth ; so they rejected it 

 altogether, forgetting that the superabundance 

 of water and its distribution on the surface of 

 our world implies that it was made more for 

 the use of fishes than for man, while upon our 

 neighboring world it would almost seem that 

 some kindly providence had planned a mode 



