14 NATURE-STUDY REVIEW (17:1— Jan., 1921 



intense brightness of insulated parts and deep gloom of those in 

 equally intense shadow. The black tho starlit sky helps the 

 violence of this contrast, for the bright mountains in the distance 

 around us stand forth upon a background formed by the darkness 

 of interplanetary space. The visible effects of these conditions 

 must be in every sense unearthly and truly terrible, The hard, 

 harsh, glowing light and pitchy shadows; the absence of all the 

 conditions that give tenderness to an earthly landscape; the black 

 noonda}^ sky, with the glaring sun ghastly in its brightness; the 

 entire absence of vestiges of an}^ life save that of the long since 

 expired volcanoes — all these conspire to make up a scene of dreary, 

 desolate grandeur that is scarcely conceivable by any earthly 

 habitant, and that the description we have attempted insuffi- 

 ciently portrays. 



A legitimate extension of the imagination leads us to impressions 

 of lunar conditions upon other senses than that of sight, to which we 

 have hitherto confined our fancy. We are met at the outset with a 

 difficulty in this extension; for^it is impossible to conceive the 

 sensations which the absence of an atmosphere would produce 

 upon the most important of our bodily functions. If we would 

 attempt the task we must conjure up feelings of suffocation, of 

 which the thoughts are, however, too horrible to be dwelt upon; 

 we must therefore maintain the delusion that we can exist without 

 air, and attempt to realize some of the less discomforting effects 

 of the absence of this meditmi. Most notable among these arc 

 the untempered heat of the direct solar rays, and the influence 

 thereof upon the surface material upon which we suppose ourselves 

 to stand. During a period of over 300 hours the sun pours down 

 his beams with unmitigate ferocity upon a soil never sheltered by a 

 cloud or cooled by a shower, till that soil is heated, as we have 

 shown, to a temperature equal nearly to that of melting lead ; and 

 this scorching influence is felt by everything upon which the stm 

 shines on the lunar globe. But while regions directly isolated are 

 thus heated, those parts turned from the sun would remain in- 

 tensely cold, and that scorching in sunshine and freezing in shade 

 with which mountaineers on the earth are familiar would be 

 experienced in a terribly exaggerated degree. Among the con- 

 sequences, already alluded to, of the alternations of temperature 

 to which the moon's crust is thus exposed, are doubtless more or 

 less considerable expansions and contractions of the surface ma- 



