NEWS FROM THE MOON. 



surface. Her face is scarred and pitted all over : nay, 

 this but faintly expresses her condition, since no one 

 can examine the moon carefully with suitable tele- 

 scopic power without being impressed by the conviction 

 that she has, so to speak, passed many times through 

 the fire. There are great seams, as if at some early 

 stage of her existence her whole globe had been rent 

 apart by internal forces ; and the duration of this early 

 stage would appear to have been considerable, since 

 there are several systems of these seams crossing and 

 intercrossing. Then would seem to have come an age 

 during which large regions sank as the moon cooled 

 and contracted, leaving other regions elevated, as in 

 the case of the great ocean valleys and continent 

 elevations of our own earth. With further contraction 

 came the formation of great corrugations, the lunar 

 Alps and Apennines and other mountain ranges. But 

 last of all, it may be presumed (if the recent results of 

 Mallet's researches into vulcanology are to be accepted), 

 came the most wonderful of all the stages of distur- 

 bances, the great era of crater formation. One would 

 say that the surface of enormous lunar tracts had 

 bubbled over like some seething terrestrial substance, 

 were it not that no materials known to us could form 

 coherent bubbles spanning circular spaces many miles 

 in diameter. Yet no other description gives so just 

 an idea of the actual appearance of extensive tracts of 

 the moon's surface, except one, equally or even perhaps 

 more fanciful : If the whole of one of these regions, 

 while still plastic from intensity of heat, had been 



