thomas] THE MOON 367 



cannot you hear it ringing? Well do you think it is ringing? 

 Why? Oh you see it shake do you? Well if you see it ringing 

 why don't you hear it? Yes, because there is no air in the jar. 

 Then it must be the air that makes us hear; if you think so let 

 in a little air; sure enough, now you can hear it ring! So it must 

 be the air that enables us to hear sound. Suppose you were on 

 the moon, and one of you wanted to tell the other something. 

 No matter how loud James should shout he could not make John 

 hear; he might see James' mouth move but that would be all; 

 James would have to make signs or write it. If all the battles 

 of Europe could have been fought on the moon no one would 

 have had shell shock from them. Even the meteors though some 

 of them weigh a thousand tons do not make any noise when they 

 fall into the moon; but they do batter its face terribly when they 

 strike it for the moon has no cushion of air in front of her to protect 

 her as the earth has. 



All of us have at some time been in a darkened room, where 

 through some tiny space would come a ray of light which would 

 proceed in a straight line to some spot on the wall, where it would 

 make a spot. If we had a prism somewhere between that opening 

 into the room and that spot on the wall, anywhere along the line 

 of light, it would strike the prism and be thrown back or refracted, 

 but it would no longer be one bright spot but light scattered to 

 all parts of the room; and it would no longer be white, but would 

 show all the seven colors which we call the spectrum. 



This is what our atmosphere does for us, it collects all the 

 rays of white light that come to us from the sun, they pass through 

 it and are scattered into all corners of the world and these rays 

 of light strike on different objects, for example, the sunlight on 

 the grass; and those rays which would look red or yellow or 

 violet, are absorbed by the plant to do work for it, and only the 

 green color is unused, or thrown back, refracted, to our eyes, and 

 we see that and call the plant green. 



The moon has no atmosphere to act as a prism and diffuse and 

 color the sun 's rays which fall on it as a strong white light, billions 

 of times stronger than the little white spot you may have seen on 

 the wall. It is so brilliant that we could not look on it without 

 being blinded. We cannot look at the sun from the earth without 

 hurting our eyes, but a smoked glass makes it quite easy. The 

 atmosphere acts as a curtain something like the smoked glass. 



