THE MOON 351 



It would be unreasonable for us to expect to find on 

 our ocean beds, could they be revealed to our eyes, the 

 same perfection and profuse diversity of configurations 

 that our land surfaces exhibit, and the same thing is true 

 of the lunar maria. These tell us just what they are. 

 The "ruined" mounds, craters, and other structures we 

 there see are merely the abortive efforts of the Ice King 

 ivhen his supply of raw material had about given out. 

 Apropos of this, I cannot forbear to quote the lucid im- 

 pressions of an amateur astronomer, Mr. John A. Cook, 

 as set forth in Popular Astronomy (No. 235) : 



For more than thirty years I have been studying and observing 

 the Lunar surface in an amateurish way, using instruments rang- 

 ing in size from two to ten inches, and have arrived at conclusions 

 at variance with those, so far as I know, held by the great selen- 

 ographers, living and dead, regarding the above mentioned fea- 

 tures. 



We find them scattered about over the floors and shores of 

 the Ocean and seas. When found fully down on the sea floor 

 they often present but the merest trace of a ring. Those on the 

 shore will show that part down in the sea destroyed, while that 

 portion of the crater on higher ground is intact. 



Writers speak of them as Ruined walls, Submerged walls, 

 Melted walls, and often as destroyed by some unknown cause. 



1 have searched the works of Neison, Pickering, Elgar, Lohr- 

 mann, Fauth, Nasmyth & Carpenter, Serviss and a host of other 

 more general works to find if some one would not suggest water 

 erosion, and if not why not, to account for their ruined condition, 

 but have failed The opinion seems to prevail that they have been 

 submerged, inundated by molten matter welling up from the in- 

 terior burying them. As this would require material enough to 

 spread over between two and three millions of square miles, and 

 to a depth of more than a mile, and as we find no trace of such 

 a lava outflow except in the seas, if there, I find it difficult to 

 accept the theory, even with my great respect for the above named 

 masters of selenography. 



CRATERS. The flatness of Mars, a larger body, indi- 

 cates that the moon should be essentially fully as flat, if 

 not more so. Such a land surface, we know from daily 

 observation, is ordinarily exceedingly cut up by channels 

 into all sorts of irregular islands and peninsulas, diver- 

 sified by equally miscellaneous small expanses of water of 

 varying depth. Let us pick out, to begin with, a large 



