THE 



NATURE-STUDY REVIEW 



Vol. 14 December, 1918 No. 9 



The Moon Story 



Ethel Hinckley Hausmax 

 New Haven, Conn. 



It is not many years since people believed that once upon a 

 time, manv millions and millions of years ago, a strange thing 

 happened on this earth of ours. In those remote days our earth 

 was not the hard, solid body that it is today, but was a larger, 

 softer, and much hotter mass, too hot, indeed for any sort of 

 life to find it comfortable to live on its surface. Great volcanoes, 

 scattered thickly about steamed continuously and spouted their 

 torrents of molten rock incessantly from out their giant craters, 

 and clouds of mud colored steam hung over all the land. It was 

 during these troubulous times that the strange thing of which I 

 have spoken, occurred. A huge fragment of the earth's mass 

 was broken off by the rapid rotation of the earth itself and was 

 sent steaming and twirling away into space, gradually assuming 

 a globular form as it went. It, too, developed volcanoes, and 

 was clothed with clouds of steamy vapor, and was in fact a real 

 daughter of our earth. But it gradually, like the earth, began 

 to cool, until finally, when thinking human beings began to make 

 their appearance on this world of ours they looked upward one 

 fine moonlight night and exclaimed, "Look, what a wonderful 

 moon!" 



Perhaps this was the way in which our moon was born but 

 astronomers of today have a new theory. By studying certain 

 bodies in our heavens called nebulae they have decided that our 

 world was formed from such a mass in the center of which was our 

 sun and rapidly spiralling around it many smaller particles of 

 different sizes perhaps in a liquid state but at any rate in such a 

 condition that when a smaller particle strayed into the path of the 

 larger ones there was a collision and the smaller one became joined 

 to and increasing still more the size of the larger. So it was that 

 our earth and other planets including the moon were born. 



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