THE MOON 341 



It is not a difficult matter to compute what the 

 moon's temperature should have been at the close of the 

 still-credited Laplacian cosmic process, and the calcula- 

 tion has been made thousands of times. Thus, Doctor 

 Lowell, in his Mars as the Abode of Life (p. 23), says, 

 ' ' On the principle that the heat caused by contraction was 

 as the body's mass, this state of things on the surface of 

 our satellite is unaccountable. The moon should have a 

 surface like a frozen sea, and it shows one that surpasses, 

 the earth's in shagginess. ' ' His calculation, he reports, 

 gives the satellite's temperature as only 27 F. "To 

 point out that any volcanic action could be produced by 

 this quantum of heat", he adds, "is superfluous". All 

 this was long known to astronomers, without, however, 

 in the least influencing their doctrinal teachings, and even 

 before Darwin took a hand, with a view to helping mat- 

 ters, by ingeniously extracting the moon from the sup- 

 posedly much hotter body of the earth. 



It then came to be taught, and is still taught in all 

 the main institutions of learning in this and other coun- 

 tries, that the numerosity and the monstrosity of the 

 lunar craters is due to the happy combination of these 

 two factors, namely, first, the possession by a small body 

 of a cosmic temperature appropriate to one 80 times 

 larger, and, second, a coincident reduction in the weight 

 of substances; the former factor supplying the desired 

 augmentation of the eruptive forces behind the volcanic 

 activities, and the latter accounting for the relatively 

 farther distance to which the lighter-weight debris was 

 driven. It was, in fact, somewhat analogous, in their 

 minds, to the imaginary transplanting of a strong man 

 from here to the moon, where his power to lift weights 

 would be sextupled. 



Struthiously shutting our eyes, as the astronomers 

 here do, to all the ifs and ands by which this ingenious 

 deduction has been arrived at, let us provisionally accept 

 it as true and see how well or ill it fulfills the require- 

 ments. 



In the first place, there is the planet Mars, which is 

 midway in mass between the earth and moon, yet not a 



