A TRIP TO THE MOON. 283 



the shores of all of its gigantic islands. There is, no 

 doubt, vital power in them, and at the proper time, at 

 His bidding, life will spring forth and order will reign, 

 where now destruction and chaos alone seem to rule 

 supreme. 



The moon is one of the great heavenly bodies, all of 

 which work together in beautiful harmony to the glory 

 of God. They all move, like loving sisters, hand in hand 

 through the great universe. As they live with each 

 other, so they evidently live for each other. Supersti- 

 tion, ignorance, and even wilful exaggeration have much 

 obscured the effects of this mutual influence. The moon 

 especially has been treated as if she existed for the ben- 

 efit of the earth only. From the times of antiquity the 

 world has been filled with fanciful stories of her influ- 

 ence on our weather, our vegetation, our health, and 

 even the state of our mind. Many have believed in a 

 daily direct communication between the two great bodies; 

 they looked upon meteoric stones as coming to us di- 

 rectly from the craters of the moon's volcanoes, and the 

 fertile imagination of happy dreamers reduced a crude 

 mass of half-true, half-fabulous details into a regular sys- 

 tem, long before the moon itself was even but tolera- 

 bly well known to us. It is notorious that men of such 

 rank as Piazzi and Sir William Herschel considered cer- 

 tain light appearances in the moon as volcanic eruptions, 

 whilst a German astronomer of great merit, Schroeter, 

 saw in them enormous fires raging in some of the cap- 

 itals of our satellite! Meteoric stones are, in our day, 

 fortunately better explained. Unless the volcanoes on 



