132 MOONLIGHT. 



can throw light into a dark room by a mirror, or 

 by white-washing a wall opposite the door on 

 which light can fall. Now the heat of the sun's 

 light, and also the greater part of the red rays, 

 enter into, and are absorbed by the moon ; and 

 thus moonlight wants the golden brightness of 

 the direct rays of the sun, and is in consequence 

 silvery, and has a little of a bluish tint in it. 



This " soft moonlight," not only delightfully 

 varies the months with its waxing, its fulness, 

 its waning, and its extinction, and not only gives 

 us landscapes of new and softened tone, which it 

 would be altogether impossible to obtain by any 

 modification of the sun's direct light, but it an- 

 swers many other important purposes in the eco- 

 nomy of nature. When the sky is darkened with 

 clouds, even to the. deepest gloom of a close No- 

 vember day, and over the black earth or the 

 barren moor, which drinks up all that falls upon it, 

 the little fragment of solar light, that glimmers by 

 countless refractions and zigzags through the little 

 drops that compose the thick clouds, has no re- 

 semblance whatever to moonlight. The fact is, 

 that those little drops decompose the light, as 

 well as retain and reflect back again a considera- 

 ble portion of it ; and the light which reaches the 

 earth at those times is a melee of little rainbows, 

 each probably not so broad as a spider's thread, in 

 which one colour so falls upon and blots another, 

 that the compound has hardly any colour at all. 



We know little of those matters ; but as dry 

 air is as perfect a non-conductor of electricity as 

 dry glass, it is exceedingly probable that when 

 clouds arrive at a certain degree of density, they 

 actually extract their own lightning out of the 



