272 LEAVES FROM THE BOOK OF NATURE. 



thousand feet, these peculiar, massive rings, these enormous 

 cliffs and furrows! How insignificant appear, in compari- 

 son, the greatest events of that kind, on our earth, where 

 even proud ./Etna hardly rivals the smallest of the moon's 

 craters! Their universal tendency to round forms has 

 led to the idea that all these elevations and indentations 

 are the effect of one and the same mysterious power. 

 Everything favors the presumption, that the moon was 

 originally a liquid mass, and that, whilst it became solid, 

 new forces were unloosened in the interior, causing gigantic 

 eruptions, as when the pent-up air bubbles up from a mass 

 of molten metal. Some of these bubbles would upon 

 bursting, naturally leave behind a circular ridge and a 

 slight rise in the centre of the cavity. These forces seem 

 to have been most active near the poles, whose desolate 

 regions are dotted over with countless hills and moun- 

 tains ; near the equator vast plains stretch out, broken 

 only here and there by a lofty peak or solitary crater. 

 Thus man, pigmy man, ventures already to read the rid- 

 dles of mysterious events that happened in the earliest 

 times of the history of a great world, which his foot has 

 never yet trodden ! He has, however, not only measured 

 the mountains of the moon, and laid out maps and charts 

 of her surface, but he has given names to mountains and 

 islands. Formerly the most renowned philosophers were 

 thus immortalized, we trust without any insidious com- 

 parison between philosophy and moonshine. Of late, how- 

 ever, dead or living astronomers, who often enjoyed little 

 enough of this world's goods, have been presented with 

 large estates in the moon. Thus Kepler, whom the great 



