NEWS FROM THE MOON. 221 



The efforts made to explain the matter have been 

 sufficiently strenuous. 



Whiston suggested that a comet had swept away the 

 lunar air and oceans, a view the more remarkable be- 

 cause he held the theory that our own oceans had been 

 formerly recruited by a comet which produced a uni- 

 versal deluge. Of course, what is now known about 

 comets will not permit us for a moment to entertain 

 the supposition that one of these bodies could carry off 

 any portion of the moon's belongings. A comet might 

 rain a shower of meteoric stones upon the moon, and 

 so recruit her mass: indeed, the idea has been suggested 

 of late that this happened repeatedly in those far-off 

 ages when all the planets were exposed to such influ- 

 ences, their 6 growing mass,' as Wendell Holmes says, 



Pelted with star-dust, stoned \vith meteor-balls. 



That the moon should borrow from comets is not un- 

 likely therefore, but that comets should rob the moon 

 is altogether improbable. 



There is another theory scarcely less fanciful. It 

 has been suggested that the moon has grown intensely 

 cold. Her small orb, though once instinct with fire, 

 has long since parted, according to this theory, with 

 all its inherent heat. All the forms of life that once 

 existed on the moon, animal life, vegetable life, and 

 the life which our imagination pictures where great 

 natural changes are in progress, have been, so to speak, 

 frozen out. The moon's oceans have congealed to their 

 utmost depths. The very gases which once formed her 

 atmosphere have frozen, until at last she has become 



