THE AUTHOR'S THEORIES OUTLINED 51 



snow and that during the succeeding summer the whole 

 of it was melted away save for a remnant, say, of one 

 inch ; that during the second winter another five feet fell, 

 and again was cleared away save for another, additional 

 inch, and so on indefinitely. Obviously, the logical out- 

 come of such a process could not be otherwise than even- 

 tually to transform the entire lunar supply of water into 

 snow and ice ; and not only that, but to transpose it from 

 its natural pools and beds onto the land. 



This "disappearance" of the moon's oceans in- 

 volves, of course, the simultaneous swallowing up of her 

 atmosphere. Meteorologists inform us that a single inch 

 of rainfall is equivalent to a 10-inch snowfall, which is 

 tantamount to saying that in changing from water into 

 snowflakes a cubic foot of the former absorbs about 10 

 cubic feet of air. 



Given the unlimited supply of building material thus 

 provided, it becomes a simple and fascinating pastime to 

 reconstruct in imagination the characteristic lunar sculp- 

 turings that heretofore have baffled selenographers : 

 plains become mesas, deep ponds graduate into caver- 

 nous craters, islands grow into mountains or mountain 

 ranges, rivers erect their level banks into precipitous 

 gorges, great lakes disguise themselves as walled-plains, 

 and so on ad infinitum. As for the changes of shading 

 of certain areas from white to drab, and back again, they 

 are obviously due to the sopping of the low areas with 

 waters of thaw, followed by freezing and, later still, by 

 belated falls of fresh snow. Again, inasmuch as there 

 can be no building up of snow-mounds on the beds of the 

 maria until they become uncovered, we find in these 

 places the dwarfed and ' ' ruined ' ' replica of all the types 

 that characterize their giant brethren on what originally 

 was the land surface. 



THE PRINCIPLE OF DISPERSION OR 

 EXPLOSION 



It has long been the dream of mankind to discover 

 some method of utilizing gravity to do work contin- 



