THE Moox 401 



But there is still another reason. When Prof. Lang- 

 ley invented the bolometer about forty years ago and 

 tested it out on the full moon, he was dumbfounded and 

 disconcerted to find that her heat radiation, instead of 

 being much hotter than at new, is really virtually the 

 same. Nevertheless, he courageously reported the fact 

 as he found it, and was severely ridiculed by no less an 

 authority than the great Proctor himself. Since then, the 

 world of science has been trying to wriggle clear of this 

 evidence; which, however, refuses to down. The sun-lit 

 side of the moon, I reassert, is intensely cold, and, being 

 so, the consequent uniformity of her atmospheric tem- 

 perature from top to bottom greatly diminishes its re- 

 fractive qualities. 



You may wish to ask me why the moon does not ro- 

 tate, seeing that she was primevally provided with liquid 

 oceans. For this there are two reasons, either one of 

 which would suffice singly. One of these is, that the sat- 

 ellite's gravistatic heat is only a small fraction of the 

 earth's, being in fact only thirty degrees higher at the 

 depth of two miles than it is at, say, 100 feet below her 

 surface. The second reason is, that inasmuch as the lunar 

 oceans could never have exceeded a half mile in depth on 

 the average, and since the weight of water there is only 

 one-sixth of what it has here, the load on the bottom 

 waters could not have been more than fifteen atmospheres 

 and consequently fell far short of the amount requisite to 

 compress them beyond their freezing density. 



THE END. 



